I 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


I 


1 


UNTIMELY 
PAPERS 


BY   RANDOLPH    BOURNE 

UNTIMELY 
PAPERS 

FOREWORD   BY   THE    EDITOR 

JAMES   OPPENHEIM 


NEW  YORK  B.  W.  HUEBSCH  MCMXIX 


COPYRIGHT,    1919,    BY   B.  W.  HUBBSCH 
PRINTED   IN    U.  S.    A 

D5a3 


EDITOR'S  FOREWORD 

Van  Wyck  Brooks  has  said  of  Randolph  Bourne 
that  he  was  the  very  type  of  that  proletarian-aris- 
tocrat which  is  coming  into  being.  When  Brooks 
and  Waldo  Frank  and  Louis  Untermeyer  and 
Paul  Rosenfeld  and  I — a  nucleus  at  the  heart  of 
a  group  including  so  many  of  the  "younger  gen- 
eration"— were  joyfully  publishing  The  Seven 
Arts  we  inevitably  found  the  phrase  "the  young 
world,"  and  by  this  phrase  we  characterized  noth- 
ing local,  but  a  new  international  life,  an  inter- 
weaving of  groups  in  all  countries,  the  unspoiled 
forces  everywhere  who  share  the  same  culture  and 
somewhat  the  same  new  vision  of  the  world. 
There  was  in  it  the  Russian  mixture  of  art  and 
revolution,  the  one  a  change  in  the  spirit  of  man, 
the  other  a  change  in  his  organized  life. 

At  first  Randolph  Bourne  was  separated  from 
us.  He  had  not  yet  ended  his  apprenticeship  to 

[5] 


that  "liberal  pragmatism"  which  he  effectually  de- 
stroys in  "Twilight  of  Idols."  He  was  still  rely- 
ing on  the  intellect  as  a  programme-maker  for  so- 
ciety. But  when  America  entered  the  war,  his  ap- 
prenticeship ended.  That  shock  set  him  free,  and 
it  was  inevitable  then  that  he  should  not  only  join 
The  Seven  Arts  but  actually  in  himself  gather  us 
all  together,  himself,  in  America,  the  very  soul  of 
"the  young  world."  No  nerve  of  that  world  was 
missing  in  him :  he  was  as  sensitive  to  art  as  to  phil- 
osophy, as  politically-minded  as  he  was  psycho- 
logic, as  brave  in  fighting  for  the  conscientious 
objector  as  he  was  in  opposing  current  American 
culture.  He  was  a  flaming  rebel  against  our 
crippled  life,  as  if  he  had  taken  the  cue  from  the 
long  struggle  with  his  own  body.  And  just  as  that 
weak  child's  body  finally  slew  him  before  he  had 
fully  triumphed,  so  the  great  war  succeeded  in 
silencing  him.  When  Randolph  Bourne  died  on 
December  22,  1918,  all  of  us  of  the  "younger  gen- 
eration" felt  'that  a  great  man  had  died  with  a 
great  work  unfinished. 

He  had  been  quite  silent  for  over  a  year,  for 
The  Seven  Arts  was  suspended   in   September, 
[6] 


1917*  ite  subsidy  withdrawn  because  of  our  atti- 
tude on  the  war.  He  was  nowhere  wanted.  It 
was  difficult  even  for  him  to  get  publication  for 
book  reviews.  Backed  only  by  a  few  friends,  he 
held  a  solitary  way,  with  hardly  the  heart  for  new 
enterprise.  Nevertheless  he  began  a  book,  "The 
State,"  in  which  he  planned  the  complete  expres- 
sion of  his  attitude,  both  destructive  and  creative. 
This  was  never  finished.  We  have  only  what 
amounts  to  an  essay ;  but  undoubtedly  this  essay  is 
the  most  effective  and  terrible  indictment  of  the 
institution  of  the  State  which  the  war  has  yet 
brought  forth.  It  furnishes  a  natural  climax  to 
The  Seven  Arts  essays;  together  they  make  a  book, 
both  historic  and  prophetic. 

We  have  nothing  else  like  this  book  in  Amer- 
ica. It  is  the  only  living  record  of  the  suppressed 
minority,  and  is,  as  so  often  the  case,  the  prophecy 
of  that  minority's  final  triumph.  Everything  that 
Bourne  wrote  over  two  years  ago  has  been  vindi- 
cated by  the  event.  A  great  chorus  takes  up  now 
the  song  of  this  solitary,  and  like  so  many  pioneers 
he  has  not  lived  to  see  his  truth  made  into  fact. 

This  book  is  but  the  first  of  several.     We  shall 

[7] 


have,  under  Van  Wyck  Brooks's  editorship,  his 
volume  of  cultural  essays,  his  reviews,  and  a  "Life 
and  Letters."  When  the  complete  picture  of 
Randolph  Bourne  emerges  he  will  be  seen  as  the 
pioneer  spirit  of  his  age,  a  symbol  of  our  future. 
His  place  in  the  American  tradition  is  secure. 
His  life  marks  the  beginning  of  our  "coming-of- 
age." 

This  book  relates  to  the  war  and  the  present 
crisis  of  the  world.  It  does  a  great  service  for  our 
country.  Without  it  our  showing  would  be  weak 
and  impoverished  compared  with,  the  Older  Na- 
tions. We  may  rejoice  that  as  England  had  her 
Bertrand  Russell,  France  her  Rolland  and  Bar- 
busse,  Germany  her  Liebknecht  and  Nicolai,  so 
America  had  her  Randolph  Bourne. 


[8] 


CONTENTS 

EDITOR'S  FOREWORD,  5 
I — OLD  TYRANNIES,  11 
II — THE  WAR  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS,  22 
III — BELOW  THE  BATTLE,  47 
IV — THE  COLLAPSE  OF  AMERICAN  STRATEGY,  61 
V — A  WAR  DIARY,  90 
VI — TWILIGHT  OF  IDOLS,  114 
VII — UNFINISHED  FRAGMENT  ON  THE  STATE,  140 


OLD  TYRANNIES 

(A  Fragment,  written  in  1918.) 

WHEN  you  come  as  an  inhabitant  to  this  earth, 
you  do  not  have  the  pleasure  of  choosing  your 
dwelling,  or  your  career.  You  do  not  even  have 
the  privilege  like  those  poor  little  shivering  souls 
in  "The  Blue  Bird,"  of  sitting  about,  all  aware  and 
wondering,  while  you  are  chosen,  one  by  one  to 
take  up  your  toilsome  way  on  earth.  You  are  a 
helpless  victim  of  your  parents'  coming  together. 
There  is  denied  you  even  the  satisfaction  of  know- 
ing that  they  created  you,  in  their  own  bungling 
fashion,  after  some  manner  of  a  work  of  art,  or  of 
what  'they  imagined  an  adequate  child  should  be. 
On  the  contrary,  you  may  be  merely  an  accident, 
unintentioned,  a  species  of  catastrophe  in  the  life 
of  your  mother,  a  drain  upon  the  resources  that 


were  none  too  great  already.  And  your  parents 
have  not  only  not  conceived  you  as  a  work  of  art, 
but  they  are  wholly  incapable  after  you  are  born  of 
bringing  you  up  like  a  work  of  art. 

The  last  indignity  perhaps  is  that  of  being  born 
unconscious,  like  a  drugged  girl  who  wakes  up 
naked  in  a  bed,  not  knowing  how  she  got  there. 
For  by  the  time  you  do  dimly  begin  to  apprehend 
your  relation  to  things  and  an  intelligible  world 
begins  to  clarify  out  of  the  buzz  and  the  darting 
lights  and  dull  sensations,  you  are  lost,  a  prisoner 
of  your  surroundings  inextricably  tangled  up  with 
your  mother's  soul  and  all  the  intimate  things 
around  you.  Your  affections  have  gotten  away 
from  your  control  and  attached  themselves  to 
things  that  you  in  later  life  discover  you  never  in- 
tended them  to  touch.  You  depend  for  comfort 
on  attitudes  of  your  mother  or  father  or  nurse  or 
brothers  and  sisters,  that  may  be  taken  away  from 
you,  leaving  you  shivering  and  forlorn.  Your 
impulses  have  had  no  intuition  of  reality.  They 
have  leaped  forth  blindly  and  have  recoiled 
against  or  been  satisfied  with  things  of  which  you 
did  not  have  the  choosing,  and  which  only  very 
[12] 


partially  seem  to  concern  themselves  with  your 
desires.  For  a  few  years,  with  infinite  tribula- 
tion, you  have  to  dodge  and  butt  and  back  your 
way  through  the  little  world  of  other  people  and 
things  that  surround  you,  until  you  are  a  little 
worn  down  to  its  shape  and  are  able  to  predict  its 
reactions. 

Everything  about  you  is  given,  ready,  consti- 
tuted, rigid,  set  up  when  you  arrive.  You  al- 
ways think  that  some  day  you  are  going  to  catch 
up  to  this  givenness,  that  you  will  dominate  in- 
stead of  falling  in  line.  Fortunate  you  are  if 
you  ever  come  to  dominate!  Usually  as  your 
world  broadens  out  more  and  more  around  you, 
you  merely  find  a  tougher  resistance  to  your  de- 
sires. Your  world  at  home  is  simple,  personal, 
appealed  to  by  all  sorts  of  personal  manifesta- 
tions. You  can  express  intense  resentment  and 
affect  it,  or  you  can  express  intense  joy  and  af- 
fect it.  Mother  and  father  have  an  invincible 
strength  over  your  feebleness,  but  your  very 
feebleness  is  a  weapon  to  break  their  harsh  domi- 
nation. Their  defenses  melt  against  your  scream 
or  your  chuckle.  As  you  grow  older  you  become 

[13] 


stronger  to  manipulate  the  world.  But  just  in 
proportion  does  the  world  become  stronger  to 
manipulate  you.  It  is  no  longer  susceptible  to 
your  scream  or  your  smile.  You  must  use  less 
personal  instruments.  But  that  requires  subtlety 
and  knowledge.  You  have  still  painfully  to  fer- 
ret out  the  ways  of  this  world,  and  learn  how  to 
use  all  sorts  of  unsuspected  tools  to  gain  your 
ends. 

For  there  stands  your  old  world,  wary,  wily, 
parrying  easily  all  your  childish  blows,  and  beat- 
ing you  down  to  your  knees,  so  that  you  must  go 
back  and  learn  your  long  apprenticeship.  By  the 
time  you  have  learned  it,  and  have  become  mas- 
ter, behold!  your  life  is  inextricably  knotted  into 
it.  As  you  learned  your  apprenticeship,  you  did 
as  the  world  did,  you  learned  the  tricks  in  order 
that  you  might  get  your  revenge  on  this  world 
and  dominate  it  as  it  has  tantalizingly  held  you 
off  and  subjugated  you.  But  by  the  time  you 
have  learned,  are  you  not  yourself  firmly  estab- 
lished as  a  part  of  the  world  yourself,  so  that  you 
dominate  nothing.  Rather  are  you  now  a  part  of 
that  very  flaming  rampart  against  which  new 


youth  advances.  You  cannot  help  being  a  part 
of  that  very  rampart  without  extinguishing  your 
own  existence. 

So  you  have  never  overtaken  the  given.  Ac- 
tually you  have  fallen  farther  and  farther  behind 
it.  You  have  not  affected  the  world  you  live  in; 
you  have  been  molded  and  shaped  by  it  your- 
self. Your  moral  responsibility  has  been  a  myth, 
for  you  were  never  really  free  enough  to  have  any 
responsibility.  While  you  thought  you  were 
making  headway,  you  were  really  being  devoured. 
And  your  children  are  as  casually  begotten  as  you 
were,  and  born  into  a  world  as  tight  and  inelastic 
as  was  yours.  You  have  a  picture  of  great  things 
achieved,  but  Time  laughs  his  ironical  laugh  and 
rolls  you  in  the  dust. 

You  would  perhaps  the  more  easily  become  free 
and  strong  if  you  could  choose  your  qualities,  or 
regulate  the  strength  of  your  impulses.  But  you 
cannot  even  do  that.  Your  ancestors  have  im- 
planted in  you  impulses  which  very  seriously  in- 
hibit you  and  impede  you  in  your  grappling  with 
the  world.  There  is  anger  which  makes  you  mis- 
interpret people's  attitudes  towards  you,  and 

[15] 


makes  you  resist  when  you  often  should  accept. 
There  is  fear,  which  makes  you  misinterpret  the 
unfamiliar  and  haunts  you  with  its  freezing 
power  all  through  life.  There  is  love,  which  ties 
you  irrationally  and  too  strongly  first  to  your 
mother  and  your  father,  and  then  to  people  who 
have  no  real  part  with  you.  And  there  is  the 
swift  revulsion  into  hatred,  when  the  loved  one 
resists  or  refuses  you.  These  impulses,  which  are 
yours  just  because  you  are  an  animal,  soon  become 
your  masters,  and  further  tie  your  hands  in  your 
response  to  the  bewildering  world  into  which  you 
have  come. 

We  grow  up  in  the  home  that  society  has  shaped 
or  coerced  our  parents  into  accepting,  we  adopt 
the  customs  and  language  and  utensils  that  have 
established  themselves  for  our  present  through  a 
long  process  of  survival  and  invention  and  change. 
We  take  the  education  that  is  given  us,  and  finally 
the  jobs  that  are  handed  out  to  us  by  society.  As 
adults,  we  act  in  the  way  that  society  expects  us 
to  act;  we  submit  to  whatever  regulations  and 
coercions  society  imposes  on  us.  We  live  almost 
entirely  a  social  life,  that  is,  a  life  as  a  constituted 

[16] 


unit  in  society,  rather  than  a  free  and  personal 
one.  Most  people  live  a  life  which  is  little  more 
than  a  series  of  quasi-official  acts.  Their  conduct 
is  a  network  of  representations  of  the  various 
codes  and  institutions  of  society.  They  act  in 
such  a  way  in  order  that  some  institutional  or 
moral  scripture  may  be  fulfilled,  rather  than  that 
some  deep  personal  direction  of  growth  should  be 
realized.  They  may  be  half  aware  that  they  are 
not  arrived  at  the  place  towards  which  their 
ardors  pointed.  They  may  dimly  realize  that 
their  outward  lives  are  largely  a  compulsion  of 
social  habit,  performed,  even  after  so  many  years, 
with  a  slight  grudgingness.  This  divorce  between 
social  compulsion  and  personal  desire,  however, 
rarely  rises  to  consciousness.  Their  conscious  life 
is  divided  between  the  mechanical  performance  of 
their  task,  the  attainment  of  their  pleasures,  and 
the  wholly  uncriticized  acceptance  and  promulga- 
tion of  the  opinions  and  attitudes  which  society 
provides  them  with. 

The  normal,  or  the  common,  relation  between 
society  and  the  individual  in  any  society  that  we 
know  of  is  that  the  individual  scarcely  exists. 

[17] 


Those  persons  who  refuse  to  act  as  symbols  of  so- 
ciety's folk-ways,  as  counters  in  the  game  of  so- 
ciety's ordainings,  are  outlawed,  and  there  exists 
an  elaborate  machinery  for  dealing  with  such  peo- 
ple. Artists,  philosophers,  geniuses,  tramps, 
criminals,  eccentrics,  aliens,  free-lovers  and  free- 
thinkers, and  persons  who  challenge  the  most 
sacred  taboos,  are  treated  with  great  concern  by 
society,  and  in  the  hue  and  cry  after  them  all, 
respectable  and  responsible  men  unanimously  and 
universally  join.  Some  are  merely  made  uncom- 
fortable, the  light  of  society's  countenance  being 
drawn  from  them;  others  are  deprived  of  their 
liberty,  placed  for  years  in  foul  dungeons,  or  even 
executed.  The  heaviest  penalties  in  modern  so- 
ciety fall  upon  those  who  violate  any  of  the  three 
sacred  taboos  of  property,  sex  and  the  State. 
Religion,  which  was  for  so  many  centuries  the 
most  exigent  and  ubiquitous  symbol  of  society's 
demand  for  conformity,  has  lapsed  in  these  later 
days  and  bequeathed  most  of  its  virus  to  the  State. 
Society  no  longer  demands  conformity  of  opinion 
in  religion,  even  in  those  countries  where  nominal 
adherence  is  still  required. 

[18] 


There  is  nothing  fixed  about  the  objects  to 
which  society  demands  conformity.  It  is  only  the 
quantity  that  seems  to  be  constant.  So  much 
conformity,  like  the  conservation  of  physical 
energy  in  the  universe,  but  the  manners  in  which 
people  shall  think  alike,  or  behave,  or  what  ob- 
jects they  shall  consider  sacred,  differ  in  myriad 
ways  throughout  different  social  groupings  and  in 
different  eras.  Diametrically  opposite  ideas  are 
held  in  two  social  groups  with  the  same  vigor  and 
fury;  diametrically  opposite  conduct  is  considered 
equally  praiseworthy  and  necessary;  two  social 
groups  will  visit  with  the  same  punishment  two 
diametrically  opposite  actions.  To  any  student 
of  primitive  societies  or  of  the  history  of  Western 
civilization,  these  facts  are  commonplaces.  But 
the  moral  is  not  a  commonplace  as  yet.  Yet  it 
must  be  evident  that  most  of  the  customs  and  at- 
titudes of  these  societies  were  almost  wholly  ir- 
rational, that  is,  they  were  social  habits  which 
persisted  solely  through  inertia  and  the  satisfac- 
tion they  gave  the  gregarious  impulse.  The  lat- 
ter had  to  be  satisfied,  so  that  anything  which  cost 
the  least  in  invention  or  reasoning  or  effort  would 

[19] 


do.  The  customs,  therefore,  of  primitive  tribes 
seem  to  practically  everybody  in  a  modern  West- 
ern society  outlandish  and  foolish.  What  evi- 
dence is  there  that  our  codes  and  conformities 
which  perform  exactly  the  same  role,  and  are 
mostly  traditional  survivals,  are  any  the  less  out- 
landish and  irrational  ?  May  they  not  be  tainted 
with  the  same  purposelessness?  Is  not  the  in- 
ference irresistible  that  they  are?  They  seem 
to  us  to  be  intelligent  and  necessary  not  because 
we  have  derived  them  or  invented  them  for  a 
clearly  imagined  and  desired  end,  but  because  they 
satisfy  our  need  for  acting  in  a  herd,  just  as  the 
primitive  savage  is  satisfied. 

The  most  important  fact  we  can  realize  about 
society  is  that  to  every  one  of  us  that  comes  into 
the  world  it  is  something  given,  irreducible.  We 
are  as  little  responsible  for  it  as  we  are  for  our 
own  birth.  From  our  point  of  view  it  is  just  as 
much  a  non-premeditated,  non-created,  irrational 
portion  of  our  environment,  as  is  the  weather. 
Entering  it  in  the  closing  years  of  the  Nineteenth 
century,  we  find  it  as  it  exists  and  as  it  has  de- 
veloped through  'the  centuries  of  human  change. 
[20] 


We  had  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  its  being  as 
it  is,  and  by  the  time  we  have  reached  such  years 
of  discretion  as  dimly  to  understand  the  complex 
of  institutions  around  us,  we  are  implicated  in  it 
and  compromised  by  it  as  to  be  little  able  to  effect 
any  change  in  its  irresistible  bulk.  No  man  who 
ever  lived  found  himself  in  a  different  relation  to 
society  from  what  we  find  ourselves.  We  all 
enter  as  individuals  into  an  organized  herd-whole 
in  which  we  are  as  significant  as  a  drop  of  water 
in  the  ocean,  and  against  which  we  can  about  as 
much  prevail.  Whether  we  shall  act  in  the  in- 
terests of  ourselves  or  of  society  is,  therefore,  an 
entirely  academic  question.  For  entering  as  we 
do  a  society  which  is  all  prepared  for  us,  so  toughly 
grounded  and  immalleable  that  even  if  we  came 
equipped  with  weapons  to  assail  it  and  make  good 
some  individual  preference,  we  could  not  in  our 
puny  strength  achieve  anything  against  it.  But 
we  come  entirely  helpless. 


[21] 


II 

THE  WAR  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

(June,   1917) 

To  .those  of  us  who  still  retain  an  irreconcilable 
animus  against  war,  it  has  been  a  bitter  experience 
to  see  the  unanimity  with  which  the  American  in- 
tellectuals have  thrown  their  support  to  the  use 
of  war-technique  in  the  crisis  in  which  America 
found     herself.     Socialists,     college     professors, 
publicists,  new-republicans,  practitioners  of  litera- 
ture, have  vied  with  each  other  in  confirming  with 
'their  intellectual  faith  the  collapse  of  neutrality 
and  the  riveting  of  the  war-mind  on  a  hundred 
million  more  of  the  world's  people.     And  the  in- 
tellectuals are  not  content  with  confirming  our 
belligerent  gesture.     They  are  now  complacently 
asserting  that  it  was  they  who  effectively  willed  it, 
against  the  hesitation  and  dim  perceptions  of  the 
[22] 


American  democratic  masses.  >  A  war  made  de- 
liberately by  the  intellectuals!  A  calm  moral 
verdict,  arrived  at  after  a  penetrating  study  of 
inexorable  facts!  Sluggish  masses,  too  remote 
from  the  world-conflict  to  be  stirred,  too  lacking 
in  intellect  to  perceive  'their  danger!  An  alert 
intellectual  class,  saving  the  people  in  spite  of 
themselves,  biding  their  time  with  Fabian  strategy 
until  the  nation  could  be  moved  into  war  without 
serious  resistance!  An  intellectual  class,  gently 
guiding  a  nation  through  sheer  force  of  ideas  into 
what  the  other  nations  entered  only  through  pre- 
datory craft  or  popular  hysteria  or  militarist  mad- 
ness !  A  war  free  from  any  taint  of  self-seeking, 
a  war  that  will  secure  the  triumph  of  democracy 
and  internationalize  the  world!  This  is  the  pic-  • 
ture  which  the  more  self-conscious  intellectuals 
have  formed  of  themselves,  and  which  they  are 
slowly  impressing  upon  a  population  which  is  be- 
ing led  no  man  knows  whither  by  an  indubitably 
intellectualized  President.  And  they  are  right,  in 
that  the  war  certainly  did  not  spring  from  either 
the  ideals  or  the  prejudices,  from  the  national 
ambitions  or  hysterias,  of  the  American  people, 

[23] 


however  acquiescent  the  masses  prove  to  be,  and 
however  clearly  the  intellectuals  prove  their 
putative  intuition. 

Those  intellectuals  who  have  felt  themselves 
totally  out  of  sympathy  with  this  drag  toward 
war  will  seek  some  explanation  for  this  joyful 
leadership.  They  will  want  to  understand  this 
willingness  of  the  American  intellect  to  open  the 
sluices  and  flood  us  with  the  sewage  of  the  war 
spirit.  We  cannot  forget  the  virtuous  horror  and 
stupefaction  which  filled  our  college  professors 
•when  they  read  the  famous  manifesto  of  their 
ninety-three  German  colleagues  in  defense  of  their 
war.  To  the  American  academic  mind  of  1914 
defense  of  war  was  inconceivable.  From  Bern- 
hardi  it  recoiled  as  from  a  blasphemy,  little  dream- 
ing 'that  two  years  later  would  find  it  creating  its 
own  cleanly  reasons  for  imposing  military  service 
on  the  country  and  for  talking  of  'the  rough  rude 
currents  of  health  and  regeneration  that  war  would 
send  through  the  American  body  politic.  They 
would  have  thought  any  one  mad  who  talked  of 
shipping  American  men  by  the  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands— conscripts — to  die  on  the  fields  of  France. 

[24] 


Such  a  spiritual  change  seems  catastrophic  when 
we  shoot  our  minds  back  to  those  days  when  neu- 
trality was  a  proud  thing.  But  the  intellectual 
progress  has  been  so  gradual  that  the  country  re- 
tains little  sense  of  the  irony.  The  war  senti- 
ment, begun  so  gradually  but  so  perseveringly  by 
the  preparedness  advocates  who  came  from  the 
ranks  of. big  business,  caught  hold  of  one  after, 
another  of  the  intellectual  groups.  With  the  aid 
of  Roosevelt,  the  murmurs  became  a  monotonous 
chant,  and  finally  a  chorus  so  mighty  'that  to  be 
out  of  it  was  at  first  to  be  disreputable  and  finally 
almost  obscene.  And  slowly  a  strident  rant  was 
worked  up  against  Germany  which  compared  very 
creditably  with  the  German  fulminations  against 
the  greedy  power  of  England.  The  nerve  of  the 
war-feeling  centered,  of  course,  in  the  richer  and 
older  classes  of  the  Atlantic  seaboard,  and  was 
keenest  where  there  were  French  or  English  busi- 
ness and  particularly  social  connections.  The 
sentiment  then  spread  over  the  country  as  a  class- 
phenomenon,  touching  everywhere  those  upper- 
class  elements  in  each  section  who  identified  them- 
selves with  this  Eastern  ruling  group.  It  must 


never  be  forgotten  that  in  every  community  it  was 
the  least  liberal  and  least  democratic  elements 
among  whom  the  preparedness  and  later  the  war 
sentiment  was  found.  The  farmers  were  apa- 
thetic, 'the  small  business  men  and  workingmen 
are  still l  apathetic  towards  the  war.  The  elec- 
tion was  a  vote  of  confidence  of  these  latter  classes 
in  a  President  who  would  keep  the  faith  of  neu- 
trality. The  intellectuals,  in  other  words,  have 
identified  themselves  with  the  least  democratic 
forces  in  American  life.  They  have  assumed  the 
leadership  for  war  of  those  very  classes  whom  the 
American  democracy  has  been  immemorially  fight- 
ing. Only  in  a  world  where  irony  was  dead  could 
an  intellectual  class  enter  war  at  the  head  of  such 
illiberal  cohorts  in  the  avowed  cause  of  world- 
liberalism  and  world-democracy.  No  one  is  left 
to  point  out  the  undemocratic  nature  of  this  war- 
liberalism.  In  a  time  of  faith,  skepticism  is  the 
most  intolerable  of  all  insults. 

Our  intellectual  class  might  have  been  occupied, 
during  the  last  two  years  of  war,  in  studying  and 
clarifying  the  ideals  and  aspirations  of  the  Ameri- 

ijune,  1917. 

[26] 


can  democracy,  in  discovering  a  true  Americanism 
which  would  not  have  been  merely  nebulous  but 
might  have  federated  the  different  ethnic  groups 
and  traditions.  They  might  have  spent  the  time 
in  endeavoring  to  clear  the  public  mind  of  the 
cant  of  war,  to  get  rid  of  old  mystical  notions  that 
clog  our  thinking.  We  might  have  used  the  time 
for  a  great  wave  of  education,  for  setting  our 
house  in  spiritual  order.  We  could  at  least  have 
set  the  problem  before  ourselves.  If  our  in- 
tellectuals were  going  to  lead  the  administration, 
they  might  conceivably  have  tried  to  find  some 
way  of  securing  peace  by  making  neutrality 
effective.  They  might  have  turned  their  in- 
tellectual energy  not  to  the  problem  of  jockeying 
the  nation  into  war,  but  to  the  problem  of  using 
our  vast  neutral  power  to  attain  democratic  ends 
for  the  rest  of  the  world  and  ourselves  without 
the  use  of  the  malevolent  technique  of  war.  They 
might  have  failed.  The  point  is  that  they  scarcely, 
tried.  The  time  was  spent  not  in  clarification 
and  education,  but  in  a  mulling  over  of  nebulous 
ideals  of  democracy  and  liberalism  and  civilization 
which  had  never  meant  anything  fruitful  to  those 

[27] 


.ruling  classes  who  now  so  glibly  used  them,  and 
in  giving  free  rein  to  the  elementary  instinct  of 
self-defense.  The  whole  era  has  been  spiritually 
wasted.  The  outstanding  feature  has  been  not 
its  Americanism  but  its  intense  colonialism.  The 
offense  of  our  intellectuals  was  not  so  much  that 
they  were  colonial — for  what  could  we  expect  of 
a  nation  composed  of  so  many  national  elements'? 
— but  that  it  was  so  one-sidedly  and  partisanly 
colonial.  The  official,  reputable  expression  of 
the  intellectual  class  has  been  that  of  the  English 
colonial.  Certain  portions  of  it  have  been  even 
more  loyalist  than  the  King,  more  British  even 
than  Australia.  Other  colonial  attitudes  have 
been  vulgar.  The  colonialism  of  the  other 
American  stocks  was  denied  a  hearing  from  the 
start.  America  might  have  been  made  a  meeting- 
ground  for  the  different  national  attitudes.  An 
intellectual  class,  cultural  colonists  of  the  different 
European  nations,  might  have  threshed  out  the 
issues  here  as  they  could  not  be  threshed  out  in 
Europe.  Instead  of  this,  the  English  colonials  in 
university  and  press  took  command  at  the  start, 
and  we  became  an  intellectual  Hungary  where 

[28] 


•thought  was  subject  to  an  effective  process  of 
Magyarization.  The  reputable  opinion  of  the 
American  intellectuals  became  more  and  more 
either  what  could  be  read  pleasantly  in  London, 
or  what  was  written  in  an  earnest  effort  to  put 
Englishmen  straight  on  their  war-aims  and  war- 
technique.  This  Magyarization  of  thought  pro- 
duced as  a  counter-reaction  a  peculiarly  offensive 
and  inept  German  apologetic,  and  the  two  par- 
tisans divided  the  field  between  them.  The  great 
masses,  the  other  ethnic  groups,  were  inarticulate. 
American  public  opinion  was  almost  as  little  pre- 
pared for  war  in  1917  as  it  was  in  1914.  ,  > 

The  sterile  results  of  such  an  intellectual  policy 
are  inevitable.  During  the  war  the  American 
intellectual  class  has  produced  almost  nothing  in 
the  way  of  original  and  illuminating  interpreta- 
tion. Veblen's  "Imperial  Germany";  Patten's 
"Culture  and  War,"  and  addresses;  Dewey's 
"German  Philosophy  and  Politics";  a  chapter  or 
two  in  Weyl's  "American  Foreign  Policies"; — is 
there  much  else  of  creative  value  in  the  intellectual 
repercussion  of  the  war1?  It  is  true  that  the  shock 
of  war  put  the  American  intellectual  to  an  unusual 

[29] 


strain.  He  had  to  sit  idle  and  think  as  spectator 
not  as  actor.  There  was  no  government  to  which 
he  could  docilely  and  loyally  tender  his  mind  as 
did  the  Oxford  professors  to  justify  England  in 
her  own  eyes.  The  American's  training  was  such 
as  to  make  the  fact  of  war  almost  incredible. 
Both  in  his  reading  of  history  and  in  his  lack  of 
economic  perspective  he  was  badly  prepared  for 
it.  He  had  to  explain  to  himself  something 
which  was  too  colossal  for  the  modern  mind,  which 
outran  any  language  or  terms  which  we  had  to 
interpret  it  in.  He  had  to  expand  his  sympathies 
to  the  breaking-point,  while  pulling  the  past  and 
present  into  some  sort  of  interpretative  order. 
The  intellectuals  in  the  fighting  countries  had  only 
to  rationalize  and  justify  what  their  country  was 
already  doing.  Their  task  was  easy.  A  neutral, 
however,  had  really  to  search  out  the  truth.  Per- 
haps perspective  was  too  much  to  ask  of  any  mind. 
Certainly  the  older  colonials  among  our  college 
professors  let  their  prejudices  at  once  dictate  their 
thought.  They  have  been  comfortable  ever  since. 
The  war  has  taught  them  nothing  and  will  teach 
them  nothing.  And  they  have  had  the  satisfac- 

[30] 


tion,  under  the  rigor  of  events,  of  seeing  prejudice 
submerge  the  intellects  of  their  younger  colleagues. 
And  they  have  lived  to  see  almost  their  entire 
class,  pacifists  and  democrats  t&o,  join  them  as 
apologists  for  the  "gigantic  irrelevance"  of  war. 

We  have  had  to  watch,  therefore,  in  this  coun- 
try the  same  process  which  so  shocked  us  abroad, 
— the  coalescence  of  the  intellectual  classes  in  sup- 
port of  the  military  programme.  In  this  country, 
indeed,  the  socialist  intellectuals  did  not  even  have 
the  grace  of  their  German  brothers  and  wait  for 
the  declaration  of  war  before  they  broke  for  cover. 
And  when  they  declared  for  war  they  showed  hpw 
thin  was  the  intellectual  veneer  of  their  socialism. 
For  they  called  us  in  terms  that  might  have 
emanated  from  any  bourgeois  journal  to  defend 
democracy  and  civilization,  just  as  if  it  was  not 
exactly  against  those  very  bourgeois  democracies 
and  capitalist  civilizations  that  socialists  had  been 
fighting  for  decades.  But  so  subtle  is  the  spiritual 
chemistry  of  the  "inside"  that  all  this  intellectual 
cohesion — herd-instinct  become  herd-intellect — 
which  seemed  abroad  so  hysterical  and  so  servile, 
comes  to  us  here  in  highly  rational  terms.  We  go 

[31] 


to  war  to  save  the  world  from  subjugation !  But 
the  German  intellectuals  went  to  war  to  save  their 
culture  from  barbarization !  And  the  French 
went  to  war  to  save  their  beautiful  France !  And 
the  English  to  save  international  honor!  And 
Russia,  most  altruistic  and  self-sacrificing  of  all, 
to  save  a  small  State  from  destruction!  Whence 
is  our  miraculous  intuition  of  our  moral  spotless- 
ness"?  Whence  our  confidence  that  history  will 
not  unravel  huge  economic  and  imperialist  forces 
upon  which  our  rationalizations  float  like  bubbles'? 
The  Jew  often  marvels  that  his  race  alone  should 
have  been  chosen  as  the  true  people  of  the  cosmic 
God.  Are  not  our  intellectuals  equally  fatuous 
when  they  tell  us  that  our  war  of  all  wars  is 
stainless  and  thrillingly  achieving  for  good^ 

An  intellectual  class  that  was  wholly  rational 
would  have  called  insistently  for  peace  and  not  for 
war.  For  months  the  crying  need  has  been  for  a 
negotiated  peace,  in  order  to  avoid  the  ruin  of  a 
deadlock.  Would  not  the  same  amount  of  reso- 
lute statesmanship  thrown  into  intervention  have 
secured  a  peace  that  would  have  been  a  subjuga- 
tion for  neither  side"?  Was  the  terrific  bargaining 

[32] 


power  of  a  great  neutral  ever  really  used1?  Our 
war  followed,  as  all  wars  follow,  a  monstrous 
failure  of  diplomacy.  Shamefacedness  should 
»•  now  be  our  intellectuals'  attitude,  because  the 
American  play  for  peace  was  made  so  little  more 
than  a  polite  play.  The  intellectuals  have  still 
to  explain  why,  willing  as  they  now  are  to  use 
force  to  continue  the  war  to  absolute  exhaustion, 
they  were  not  willing  to  use  force  to  coerce  the 
world  to  a  speedy  peace. 

Their  forward  vision  is  no  more  convincing  than 
their  past  rationality.     We  go  to  war  now   to 

internationalize    the    world!     But    surely    their 
i 

League  to  Enforce  Peace  is  only  a  palpable 
apocalyptic  myth,  like  the  syndicalists'  myth  of 
the  "general  strike."  It1  is  not  a  rational  pro- 
gramme so  much  as  a  glowing  symbol  for  the  pur- 
pose of  focusing  belief,  of  setting  enthusiasm  on 
fire  for  international  order.  As  far  as  it  does  this 
it  has  pragmatic  value,  but  as  far  as  it  provides  a 
certain  radiant  mirage  of  idealism  for  this  war 
and  for  a  world-order  founded  on  mutual  fear,  it 
is  dangerous  and  obnoxious.  Idealism  should  be 
kept  for  what  is  ideal.  It  is  depressing  to  think 

[33] 


that  the  prospect  of  a  world 'so  strong  that  none 
dare  challenge  it  should  be  the  immediate  ideal  of 
the  American  intellectual.  If  the  League  is  only 
a  makeshift,  a  coalition  into  which  we  enter  to 
restore  order,  then  it  is  only  a  description  of  exist- 
ing fact,  and  the  idea  should  be  treated  as  such. 
But  if  it  is  an  actually  prospective  outcome  of  the 
settlement,  the  keystone  of  American  policy,  it  is 
neither  realizable  nor  .  desirable.  For  the  pro- 
gramme of  such  a  League  contains  no  provision 
for  dynamic  national  growth  or  for  international 
economic  justice.  In  a  world  which  requires 
recognition  of  economic  internationalism  far  more 
than  of  political  internationalism,  an  idea  is  re- 
actionary which  proposes  to  petrify  and  federate 
the  nations  as  political  and  economic  units.  Such 
a  scheme  for  international  order  is  a  dubious  justi- 
fication for  American  policy.  And  if  American 
policy  had  been  sincere  in  its  belief  that  our  par- 
ticipation would  achieve  international  beatitude, 
would  we  not  have  made  our  entrance  into  the  war 
conditional  upon  a  solemn  general  agreement  to 
respect  in  the  final  settlement  these  principles  of 
international  order1?  Could  we  have  afforded,  if 

[34] 


our  war  was  to  end  War  by  the  establishment  of  a 
league  of  honor,  to  risk  the  defeat  of  our  vision 
and  our  betrayal  in  the  settlement*?  Yet  we  are 
in  the  war,  and  no  such  solemn  agreement  was 
made,  nor  has  it  even  been  suggested. 

The  case  of  the  intellectuals  seems,  therefore, 
only  very  speciously  rational.  They  could  have 
used  their  energy  to  force  a  just  peace  or  at  least 
to  devise  other  means  than  war  for  carrying 
through  American  policy.  They  could  have  used 
their  intellectual  energy  to  ensure  that  our  par- 
ticipation in  the  war  meant  the  international  order 
which  they  wish.  Intellect  was  not  so  used.  It 
was  used  to  lead  an  apathetic  nation  into  an  irre- 
sponsible war,  without  guarantees  from  those 
belligerents  whose  cause  we  were  saving.  The  , 
American  intellectual,  therefore,  has  been  rational  . 
neither  in  his  hindsight  nor  his  foresight.  To  ex- 
plain him  we  must  look  beneath  the  intellectual 
reasons  to  the  emotional  disposition.  It  is  not  so 
much  what  they  thought  as  how  they  felt  that 
explains  our  intellectual  class.  Allowing  for 
colonial  sympathy,  there  was  still  the  personal 
shock  in  a  world- war  which  outraged  all  our  pre- 

[35] 


conceived  notions  of  the  way  the  world  was  tend- 
ing. It  reduced  to  rubbish  most  of  the  humani- 
tarian internationalism  and  democratic  national- 
ism which  had  been  the  emotional  thread  of  our 
intellectuals'  life.  We  had  suddenly  to  make  a 
new  orientation.  There  were  mental  conflicts. 
Our  latent  colonialism  strove  with  our  longing  for 
American  unity.  Our  desire  for  peace  strove  with 
our  desire  for  national  responsibility  in  the  world. 
That  first  lofty  and  remote  and  not  altogether  un- 
sound feeling  of  our  spiritual  isolation  from  the 
conflict  could  not  last.  There  was  the  itch  to  be 
in  the  great  experience  which  the  rest  of  the  world 
was  having.  Numbers  of  intelligent  people  who 
had  never  been  stirred  by  the  horrors  of  capitalistic 
peace  at  home  were  shaken  out  of  their  slumber  by 
the  horrors  of  war  in  Belgium.  Never  having 
felt  responsibility  for  labor  wars  and  oppressed 
.masses  and  excluded  races  at  home,  they  had  a 
large  fund  of  idle  emotional  capital  to  invest  in 
the  oppressed  nationalities  and  ravaged  villages  of 
Europe.  Hearts  that  had  felt  only  ugly  contempt 
for  democratic  strivings  at  home  beat  in  tune  with 
the  struggle  for  freedom  abroad.  All  this  was 

[36] 


natural,s  but  it  tended  to  over-emphasize  our  re- 
sponsibility. And  it  threw  our  thinking  out  of 
gear.  The  task  of  making  our  own  country  de- 
tailedly  fit  for  peace  was  abandoned  in  favor  of  a 
feverish  concern  for  the  management  of  the  war, 
advice  to  the  fighting  governments  on  all  matters, 
military,  social  and  political,  and  a  gradual  work- 
ing up  of  the  conviction  that  we  were  ordained  as 
a  nation  to  lead  all  erring  brothers  towards  the 
light  of  liberty  and  democracy.  The  failure  of 
the  American  intellectual  class  to  erect  a  creative 
attitude  toward  the  war  can  be  explained  by  these 
sterile  mental  conflicts  which  'the  shock  to  our 
ideals  sent  raging  through  us. 

Mental  conflicts  end  either  in  a  new  and  higher 
synthesis  or  adjustment,  or  else  in  a  reversion  to 
more  primitive  -ideas  which  have  been  outgrown 
but  to  which  we  drop  when  jolted  out  of  our  at- 
tained position.  The  war  caused  in  America  a 
recrudescence  of  nebulous  ideals  which  a  younger 
generation  was  fast  outgrowing  because  it  had 
passed  the  wistful  stage  and  was  discovering  con- 
crete ways  of  getting  them  incarnated  in  actual  in- 
stitutions. The  shock  of  the  war  threw  us  back 

[37] 


from  this  pragmatic  work  into  an  emotional  bath 
of  these  old  ideals.  There  was  even  a  somewhat 
rarefied  revival  of  our  primitive  Yankee  boastful- 
4.  ness,  the  reversion  of  senility  to  that  republican 
childhood  when  we  expected  the  whole  world  to 
copy  our  republican  institutions.  We  amusingly 
ignored  the  fact  that  it  was  just  that  Imperial 
German  regime,  to  whom  we  are  to  teach  the  art 
of  self-government,  which  our  own  Federal  struc- 
ture, with  its  executive  irresponsible  in  foreign 
policy  and  with  its  absence  of  parliamentary  con- 
trol, most  resembles.  And  we  are  missing  the 
x  exquisite  irony  of  the  unaffected  homage  paid  by 
the  American  democratic  intellectuals  to  the  last 
and  most  detested  of  Britain's  tory  premiers  as 
the  representative  of  a  "liberal"  ally,  as  well  as 
the  irony  of  the  selection  of  the  best  hated  of 
America's  bourbon  "old  guard"  as  the  missionary 
of  American  democracy  to  Russia. 

The  intellectual  state  that  could  produce  such 
things  is  one  where  reversion  has  taken  place  to 
more  primitive  ways  of  thinking.  Simple  syllo- 
gisms are  substituted  for  analysis,  things  are 
known  by  their  labels,  our  heart's  desire  dictates 

[38] 


what  we  shall  see.  The  American  intellectual 
class,  having  failed  to  make  the  higher  syntheses, 
regresses  to  ideas  that  can  issue  in  quick,  simplified 
action.  Thought  becomes  any  easy  rationaliza- 
tion of  what  is  actually  going  on  or  what  is  to  • 
happen  inevitably  to-morrow.  It  is  true  that  cer- 
tain groups  did  rationalize  their  colonialism  and 
attach  the  doctrine  of  the  inviolability  of  British 
sea-power  to  the  doctrine  of  a  League  of  Peace. 
But  this  agile  resolution  of  the  mental  conflict  did 
not  become  a  higher  synthesis,  to  be  creatively 
developed.  It  gradually  merged  into  a  justifica- 
tion for  our  going  to  war.  It  petrified  into  a' 

.  s 

dogma  to  be  propagated.  Criticism  flagged  and 
emotional  propaganda  began.  Most  of  the  so- 
cialists, the  college  professors  and  the  practitioners 
of  literature,  however,  have  not  even  reached  this 
high-water  mark  of  synthesis.  Their  mental  con- 
flicts have  been  resolved  much  more  simply.  War 
in  the  interests  of  democracy!  This  was  almost 
the  sum  of  their  philosophy.  The  primitive  idea 
to  which  they  regressed  became  almost  insensibly 
translated  into  a  craving  for  action.  War  was 
seen  as  the  crowning  relief  of  their  indecision. 

[39] 


At  last  action,  irresponsibility,  the  end  of  anxious 
and '  torturing  attempts  to  reconcile  peace-ideals 
with  the  drag  of  the  world  towards  Hell.  An 
end  to  the  pain  of  trying  to  adjust  the  facts  to 
what  they  ought  .to  be !  Let  us  consecrate  the 
facts  as  ideal!  Let  us  join  the  greased  slide 
towards  war !  The  momentum  increased.  Hesi- 
tations, ironies,  consciences,  considerations, — all 
were  drowned  in  the  elemental  blare  of  doing 
something  aggressive,  colossal.  The  new-found 
Sabbath  "peacefulness  of  being  at  war" !  The 
thankfulness  with  which  so  many  intellectuals. lay 
down  and  floated  with  the  current  betrays  the 
hesitation  and  suspense  through  which  they  had 
been.  The  American  university  is  a  brisk  and 
happy  place  these  days.  Simple,  unquestioning 
action  has  superseded  the  knots  of  thought.  The 
thinker  dances  with  reality. 

.  With  how  many  of  the  acceptors  of  war  has  it 
been  mostly  a  dread  of  intellectual  suspense?  It 
is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  intellectuality  neces- 
sarily makes  for  suspended  judgments.  The  in- 
tellect craves  certitude^.  It  takes  effort  to  keep  it 
^  supple  and  pliable.  In  a  time  of  danger  and 


disaster  we  jump  desperately  for  some  dogma  to 
cling  to.  The  time  comes,  if  we  try'  to  hold  out, 
when  our  nerves  are  sick  with  fatigue,  and  We 
seize  in  a  great  healing  wave  of  release  some  doc- 
trine that  can  be  immediately  translated  into  ac- 
tion. Neutrality  meant  suspense,  and  so  it 
became  the  object  of  loathing  to  frayed  nerves. 
The  vital  myth  of  the  League  of  Peace  provides  a 
dogma  to  jump  to.  With  war  the  world  becomes 
motor  again  and  speculation  is  brushed  aside  like 
cobwebs.  The  blessed  emotion  of  "self-defense 
intervenes  too,  which  focused  millions  in  Europe. 
A  few  keep  up  a  critical  pose  after  war  is  begun, 
but  since  they  usually  advise  action  which  is  in 
one-to-one  correspondence  with  what  the  mass  is 
already  doing,  their  criticism  is  little  more  than  a 
rationalization  of  the  common  emotional  drive. 

The  results  of  war  on  the  intellectual  class  are 
already  apparent.  Their  thought  becomes  little 
more  than  a  description  and  justification  of  what 
is  going  on.  They  turn  upon  any  rash  one  who 
continues  idly  to  speculate.  Once  the  war  is  on, 
the  conviction  spreads  that  individual  thought  is 
helpless,  that  the  only  way  one  can  count  is  as  a 


cog  in  the  great  wheel.  There  is  no  good  holding 
back.  We  are  told  to  dry  our  unnoticed  and  in- 
effective tears  and  plunge  into  the  great  work. 
Not  only  is  every  one  forced  into  line,  but  the 
new  certitude  becomes  idealized.  It  is  a  noble 
realism  which  opposes  itself  to  futile  obstruction 
and  the  cowardly  refusal  to  face  facts.  This 
realistic  boast  is  so  loud  and  sonorous  that  one 
wonders  whether  realism  is  always  a  stern  and 
intelligent  grappling  with  realities.  May  it  not 
be  sometimes  a  mere  surrender  to  the  actual,  an 
abdication  of  the  ideal  through  a  sheer  fatigue 
from  intellectual  suspense?  The  pacifist  is 
roundly  scolded  for  refusing  to  face  the  facts,  and 
for  retiring  into  his  own  world  of  sentimental 
desire.  But  is  the  realist,  who  refuses  to  chal- 
lenge or  criticize  facts,  entitled  to  any  more  credit 
than  that  which  comes  from  following  the  line  of 
least  resistance*?  The  realist  thinks  he  at  least 
can  control  events  by  linking  himself  to  the  forces 
that  are  moving.  Perhaps  he  can.  But  if  it  is  a 
question  of  controlling  war,  it  is  difficult  to  see 
how  the  child  on  the  back  of  a  mad  elephant  is  to 
be  any  more  effective  in  stopping  the  beast  than 

[42] 


is  the  child  who  tries  to  stop  him  from  the  ground. 
The  ex-humanitarian,  turned  realist,  sneers  at  the 
snobbish  neutrality,  colossal  conceit,  crooked 
thinking,  dazed  sensibilities,  of  those  who  are  still 
unable  to  find  any  balm  of  consolation  for  this 
war.  We  manufacture  consolations  here  in 
America  while  there  are  probably  not  a  dozen  men 
fighting  in  Europe  who  did  not  long  ago  give  up 
every  reason  for  their  being  there  except  that 
nobody  knew  how  to  get  them  away. 

But  the  intellectuals  whom  the  crisis  has 
crystallized  into  an  acceptance  of  war  have  put 
themselves  into  a  terrifyingly  strategic  position. 
It  is  only  on  the  craft,  in  the  stream,  they  say, 
that  one  has  any  chance  of  controlling  the  current 
forces  for  liberal  purposes.  If  we  obstruct,  we 
surrender  all  power  for  influence.  If  we  respon- 
sibly approve,  we  then  retain  our  power  for  guid- 
ing. We  will  be  listened  to  as  responsible  think- 
ers, while  those  who  obstructed  the  coming  of  war 
have  committed  intellectual  suicide  and  shall  be 
cast  into  outer  darkness.  Criticism  by  the  ruling 
powers  will  only  be  accepted  from  those  intellec- 
tuals who  are  in  sympathy  with  the  general  tend- 

[43] 


ency  of  the  war.  Well,  it  is  true  that  they  may 
guide,  but  if  their  stream  leads  to  disaster  and  the 
frustration  of  national  life,  is  their  guiding  any 
more  than  a  preference  whether  they  shall  go  over 
the  right-hand  or  the  left-hand  side  of  the  preci- 
pice4? Meanwhile,  however,  there  is  comfort  on 
board.  Be  with  us,  they  call,  or  be  negligible, 
irrelevant.  Dissenters  are  already  excommuni- 
cated. Irreconcilable  radicals,  wringing  their 
hands  among  the  debris,  become  the  most  despic- 
able and  impotent  of  men.  There  seems  no  choice 
for  the  intellectual  but  to  join  the  mass  of  accept- 
ance. But  again  the  terrible  dilemma  arises,— 
either  support  what  is  going  on,  in  which  case  you 
count  for  nothing  because  you  are  swallowed  in 
the  mass  and  great  incalculable  forces  bear  you  on; 
or  remain  aloof,  passively  resistant,  in  which  case 
you  count  for  nothing  because  you  are  outside  the 
machinery  of  reality. 

Is  there  no  place  left,  then,  for  the  intellectual 
who  cannot  yet  crystallize,  who  does  not  dread  sus-. 
pense,  and  is  not  yet  drugged  with  fatigue"?  The 
American  intellectuals,  in  their  preoccupation  with 
reality,  seem  to  have  forgotten  that  the  real  enemy 

[44] 


is  War  rather  than  imperial  Germany.  There  is 
work  to  be  done  to  prevent  this  war  of  ours  from 
passing  into  popular  mythology  as  a  holy  crusade. 
What  shall  we  do  with  leaders  who  tell  us  that 
we  go  to  war  in  moral  spotlessness,  or  who  make 
"democracy"  synonymous  with  a  republican  form 
of  government  ?  There  is  work  to  be  done  in 
still  shouting  that  all  the  revolutionary  by- 
products will  not  justify  the  war,  or  make  war 
anything  else  than  the  most  noxious  complex  of  all 
the  evils  that'  afflict  men.  There  must  be  some 
to  find  no  consolation  whatever,  and  some  to  sneer 
at  those  who  buy  the  cheap  emotion  ofx  sacrifice. 
There  must  be  some  irreconcilables  left  who  will 
not  even  accept  the  war  with  walrus  tears.  There 
must  be  some  to  call  unceasingly  for  peace,  and 
some  to  insist  that  the  terms  of  settlement  shall  be 
not  only  liberal  but  democratic.  There  must  be 
some  intellectuals  who  are  not  willing  to  use  the 
old  discredited  counters  again  and  to  support  a 
peace  which  would  leave  all  the  old  inflammable 
materials  of  armament  lying  about  the  world. 
There  must  still  be  opposition  to  any  contemplated 
"liberal"  world-order  founded  on  military  coali- 


tions.  The  "irreconcilable"  need  not  be  disloyal. 
He  need  not  even  be  "impossibilist."  His  apathy 
towards  war  should  take  the  form  of  a  heightened 
energy  and  enthusiasm  for  the  education,  the  art, 
the  interpretation  that  make  for  life  in  the  midst 
of  the  world  of  death.  The  intellectual  who  re- 
tains his  animus  against  war  will  push  out  more 
boldly  than  ever  to  make  his  case  solid  against  it. 
The  old  ideals  crumble ;  new  ideals  must  be  forged. 
His  mind  will  continue  to  roam  widely  and  cease- 
lessly. The  thing  he  will  fear  most  is  premature 
crystallization.  If  the  American  intellectual 
class  rivets  itself  to  a  "liberal"  philosophy  that 
perpetuates  the  old  errors,  there  will  then  be  need 
for  "democrats"  whose  task  will  be  to  divide,  con- 
fuse, disturb,  keep  the  intellectual  waters  con- 
stantly in  motion  to  prevent  any  such  ice  from  ever 
forming. 


[46] 


Ill 

BELOW  THE  BATTLE 

(July,   1917) 

HE  is  one  of  those  young  men  who,  because  his 
parents  happened  to  mate  during  a  certain  ten 
years  of  the  world's  history,  has  had  now  to  put 
his  name  on  a  wheel  of  fate,  thereby  submitting 
himself  to  be  drawn  into  a  brief  sharp  course  of 
military  training  before  being  shipped  across  the 
sea  to  kill  Germans  or  be  killed  by  them.  He 
do£s  not  like  this  fate  that  menaces  him,  and  he 
dislikes  it  because  he  seems  to  find  nothing  in  the 
programme  marked  out  for  him  which  touches  re- 
motely his  aspirations,  his  impulses,  or  even  his 
desires.  My  friend  is  not  a  happy  young  man, 
but  even  -the  unsatisfactory  life  he  is  living  seems 
supplemented  at  no  single  point  by  the  life  of  the 
drill-ground  or  the  camp  or  the  stinking  trench. 

[47] 


He  visualizes  the  obscenity  of  the  battlefield  and 

1  turns  away  in  nausea.     He  thinks  of  the  weary 

regimentation  of  young  men,  and  is  filled  with 

>  disgust.     His  mind  has  turned  sour  pn  war  and 

all  that  it  involves.     He  is  poor  material  for  the 

military  proclamation  and  the  drill-sergeant. 

I  want  to  understand  this  friend  of  mine,  for  he 
seems  rather  typical  of  a  scattered  race  of  young 
Americans  of  to-day.  He  does  not  ffall  easily 
into  the  categories  of  patriot  and  coward  which 
the  papers  are  making  popular.  He  feels  neither 
patriotism  nor  fear,  only  an  apathy  toward  the 
war,  faintly  warmed  into  a  smoldering  resent- 
ment at  the  men  who  have  clamped  down  the  war- 
pattern  upon  him  and  that  vague  mass  of  people 
and  ideas  and  workaday  living  around  him  that 
he  thinks  of  as  his  country.  Now  that  resent- 
ment has  knotted  itself  into  a  tortured  tangle  of 
what  he  should  do,  how  he  can  best  be  true  to  his 
creative  self?  I  should  say  that  his  apathy  cannot 
be  imputed  to  cowardly  ease.  My  friend  earns 
about  fifteen  hundred  dollars  a  year  as  an  archi- 
tect's assistant,  and  he  lives  alone  in  a  little  room 
over  a  fruitshop.  He  worked  his  way  through 

[48] 


college,  and  he  has  never  known  even  a  leisurely 
month.  There  is  nothing  Phseacian  about  his 
life.  It  is  scarcely  to  save  his  skin  for  riotous 
living  that  he  is  reluctant  about  war.  Since  he 
left  college  he  has  been  trying  to  find  his  world. 
He  is  often  seriously  depressed  and  irritated  with 
himself  for  not  having  hewed  out  a  more  glorious 
career  for  himself.  His  work  is  just  interesting 
enough  to  save  it  from  drudgery,  and  yet  not 
nearly  independent  and  exacting  enough  to  give 
him  a  confident  professional  sense.  Outside  his 
work,  life  is  deprived  and  limited  rather  than 
luxurious.  He  is  fond  of  music  and  goes  to  cheap 
concerts.  He  likes  radical  meetings,  but  never 
could  get  in  touch  with  the  agitators.  His  friends 
are  seeking  souls  just  like  himself.  He  likes  mid- 
night talks  in  cafes  and  studios,  but  he  is  not  es- 
pecially amenable  to  drink.  His  heart  of  course 
is  hungry  and  turbid,  but  his  two  or  three  love- 
affairs  have  not  clarified  anything  for  him.  He 
eats  three  rather  poor  restaurant  meals  a  /day. 
When  he  reads,  it  is  philosophy — Nietzsche, 
James,  Bergson — or  the  novels  about  youth — 
Holland,  Nexo,  Cannan,  Frenssen,  Beresford. 

[49] 


He  has  a  rather  constant  mood  of  futility,  though 
he  is  in  unimpeachable  health.  There  are  mo- 
ments when  life  seems  quite  without  sense  or  pur- 
pose. He  has  enough  friends,  however,  to  be  not 
quite  lonely,  and  yet  they  are  so  various  as  to  leave 
him  always  with  an  ache  for  some  more  cohesive, 
purposeful  circle.  His  contacts  with  people  irri- 
tate him  without  rendering  him  quite  unhopeful. 
He  is  always  expecting  he  doesn't  know  quite 
what,  and  always  being  frustrated  of  he  doesn't 
quite  know  what  would  have  pleased  him.  Per- 
haps he  never  had  a  moment  of  real  external  or 
internal  ease  in  his  life. 

Obviously  a  creature  of  low  vitality,  with 
neither  the  broad  vision  to  be  stirred  by  the  Presi- 
dent's war  message,  nor  the  red  blood  to  itch  for 
the  dummy  bayonet-charge.  Yet  somehow  he 
does  not  seem  exactly  weak,  and  there  is  a  con- 
sistency about  his  attitude  which  intrigues  me. 
Since  he  left  college  eight  years  ago,  he  has  been 
through  most  of  the  intellectual  and  emotional 
fads  of  the  day.  He  has  always  cursed  himself 
for  being  so  superficial  and  unrooted,  and  he  has 
tried  to  write  a  little  of  the  thoughts  that  stirred 


him.  What  he  got  down  on  paper  was,  of  course, 
the  usual  large  vague  feeling  of  a  new  time  that 
all  of  us  feel.  With  the  outbreak  of  the  Great 
War,  most  of  his  socialist  and  pacifist  theories 
were  knocked  flat.  The  world  turned  out  to  be 
an  entirely  different  place  from  what  he  had 
thought  it.  Progress  and  uplift  seemed  to  be  in- 
definitely suspended,  though  it  was  a  long  time 
before  he  realized  how  much  he  had  been  corroded 
by  the  impact  of  news  and  the  endless  discussions 
he  heard.  I  think  he  gradually  worked  himself 
into  a  truly  neutral  indifference.  The  reputable 
people  and  the  comfortable  classes  who  were  hav- 
ing all  the  conventional  emotions  rather  disgusted 
him.  The  neurotic  fury  about  self-defense 
seemed  to  come  from  types  and  classes  that  he  in- 
stinctively detested.  He  was  not  scared,  and 
somehow  he  could  not  get  enthusiastic  about  de- 
fending himself  with  "preparedness"  unless  he 
were  badly  scared.  Things  got  worse.  All  that 
he  valued  seemed  frozen  until  the  horrible  mess 
came  to  a  close.  He  had  gone  to  an  unusually 
intelligent  American  college,  and  he  had  gotten  a 
feeling  for  a  humane  civilization  that  had  not  left 

[51] 


him.  The  war,  it  is  true,  bit  away  piece  by  piece 
every  ideal  that  made  this  feeling  seem  plausible. 
Most  of  the  big  men — intellectuals — whom  he 
thought  he  respected  had  had  so  much  of  their 
idealism  hacked  away  and  got  their  nerves  so 
frayed  that  they  became  at  last,  in  their  panic, 
willing  and  even  eager  to  adopt  the  war-technique 
in  aid  of  their  government's  notions  of  the  way  to 
impose  democracy  on  the  world. 

My  poor  young  friend  can  best  be  understood 
as  too  nai've  and  too  young  to  effect  this  meta- 
morphosis. Older  men  might  mix  a  marvelous 
intellectual  brew  of  personal  anger,  fear,  a  sense 
of  "dishonor,"  fervor  for  a  League  of  Peace,  and 
set  going  a  machinery  that  crushed  everything  in- 
telligent, humane  and  civilized.  My  friend  was 
less  flexible.  War  simply  did  not  mix  with  any- 
thing that  he  had  learned  to  feel  was  desirable. 
Something  in  his  mind  spewed  it  out  whenever  it 
was  suggested  as  a  cure  for  our  grievous  American 
neutrality.  As  I  got  all  this  from  our  talks,  he 
did  not  seem  weak.  He  merely  had  no  notion  of 
the  patriotism  that  meant  the  springing  of  a  nation 
to  arms.  He  read  conscientiously  The  New  -. 

"   [52] 


Republic's  feast  of  eloquent  idealism,  with  its  ap- 
pealing harbingers  of  a  cosmically  efficacious  and 
well-bred  war.  He  would  often  say,  This  is  all 
perfectly  convincing;  why,  then,  are  we  not  all 
convinced4?  He  seemed  to  understand  the  argu- 
ment for  American  participation.  We  both  stood 
in  awe  at  the  superb  intellectual  structure  that  was 
built  up.  But  my  friend  is  one  of  those  unfor- 
tunate youths  whose  heart  has  to  apprehend  as 
well  as  his  intellect,  and  it  was  his  heart  that  in- 
exorably balked.  So  he  was  in  no  mood  to  feel 
the  worth  of  American  participation,  in  spite  of 
the  infinite  tact  and  Fabian  strategy  of  the  Execu- 
tive and  his  intellectualist  backers.  He  felt  apart 
from  it  all.  He  had  not  the  imagination  to  see  a 
healed  world-order  built  out  of  the  rotten 
materials  of  armaments,  diplomacy  and  "liberal" 
statesmanship.  And  he  wasn't  affected  by  the 
psychic  complex  of  panic,  hatred,  rage,  class- 
arrogance  and  patriotic  swagger  that  was  creating 
in  newspaper  editors  and  in  the  "jeunesse  doree" 
around  us  the  authentic  elan  for  war. 

My  friend  is  thus  somehow  in  the  nation  but 
not  of  the  nation.     The  war  has  as  yet  got  no 

[53] 


conceivable  clutch  on  his  soul.  He  knows  that 
theoretically  he  is  united  with  a  hundred  million 
in  purpose,  sentiment  and  deed  for  an  idealistic 
war  to  defend  democracy  and  civilization  against 
predatory  autocracy.  Yet  somehow,  in  spite  of 
all  the  excitement,  nobody  has  as  yet  been  able  to 
make  this  real  to  him.  He  is  healthy,  intelligent, 
idealistic.  The  irony  is  that  the  demand  which 
his  country  now  makes  on  him  is  one  to  which  not 
one  single  cell  or  nerve  of  idealism  or  desire  re- 
sponds. The  cheap  and  silly  blare  of  martial  life 
leaves  him  cold.  The  easy  inflation  of  their 
will-to-power  which  is  coming  to  so  many  people 
from  their  participation  in  volunteer  or  govern- 
ment service,  or,  better  still,  from  their  urging 
others  to  farm,  enlist,  invest,  retrench,  organize, — 
none  of  this  allures  him.  His  life  is  uninteresting 
and  unadventurous,  but  it  is  not  quite  dull  enough 
to  make  this  activity  or  anything  he  knows  about 
>war  seem  a  release  into  lustier  expression.  He 
has  ,  ideals  but  he  cannot  see  their  realization 
through  a  desperate  struggle  to  the  uttermost.  He 
doubts  the  "saving"  of  an  America  which  can  only 
be  achieved  through  world-suicide.  He  wants 

[54] 


democracy,  but  he  does  not  want  the  kind  of 
democracy  we  will  get  by  this  war  enough  to  pay 
the  suicidal  cost  of  getting  it  in  the  way  we  set 
about  it. 

Dulce  et  decorum  est  pro  patria  mori,  sweet  and 
becoming  is  it  to  die  for  one's  country.  This  is 
the  young  man  who  is  suddenly  asked  to  die  for 
his  country.  My  friend  was  much  concerned 
about  registration.  He  felt  coercive  forces  closing 
in  upon  him.  He  did  not  want  to  register  for 
the  purposes  of  being  liable  to  conscription.  It 
would  be  doing  something  positive  when  he  felt 
only  apathy.  Furthermore,  if  he  was  to  resist, 
was  it  not  better  to  take  a  stand  now  than  to  wait 
to  be  drafted?  On  the  other  hand,  was  it  not 
too  much  of  a  concession  to  rebel  at  a  formality? 
He  did  not  really  wish  to  be  a  martyr.  Going 
to  prison  for  a  year  for  merely  refusing  to  register  ' 
was  rather  a  grotesque  and  futile  gesture.  He  did 
not  see  himself  as  a  hero,  shedding  inspiration  by 
his  example  to  his  fellows.  He  did  not  care  what 
others  did.  His  objection  to  prison  was  not  so 
much  fear  perhaps  as  contempt  for  a  silly  sacrifice. 
He  could  not  keep  up  his  pose  of  complete  aliency 

[55] 


from  the  war-enterprise,  now  that  registration  was 
upon  him.  Better  submit  stoically,  he  thought,*  to 
the  physical  pressure,  mentally  reserving  his  sense 
of  spiritual  aliency  from  the  enterprise  into  which 
he  was  being  •  remorselessly  molded.  Yet  my 
friend  is  no  arrant  prig.  He  does  not  pretend  to 
be  a  "world-patriot,"  or  a  servant  of  some  higher 
law  than  his  country's.  Nor  does  he  feel 
blatantly  patriotic.  With  his  groping  philosophy 
of  life,  patriotism  has  merely  died  as  a  concept  of 
significance  for  him.  Iris  to  him  merely  the  emo- 
tion that  fills  the  herd  when  it  imagines  itself  en- 
gaged in  massed  defense  or  massed  attack.  Hav- 
ing no  such  images,  he  has  no  feeling  of  patriotism: 
He  still  feels  himself  inextricably  a  part  of  this 
blundering,  wistful,  crass  civilization  we  call 
America.  All  he  asks  is  not  to  be  identified  with 
it  for  warlike  ends.  He  does  not  feel  pro-Ger- 
man. He  tells  me  there  is  not  a  drop  of  any  but 
British  blood  in  his  veins.  He  does  not  love  the 
Kaiser.  He  is  quite  willing  to  believe  that  it  is 
the  German  government  and  not  the  German 
people  whom  he  is  asked  to  fight,  although  it  may 
be  the  latter  whom  he  is  obliged  to  kill.  But 

[56] 


he  cannot  forget  that  it  is  the  American  govern-  ' 
ment  rather  than  the  American  people  who  got  up 
the  animus  to  fight  the  German  government.  He 
does  not  forget  that  the  American  government,  * 
having  through  tragic  failure  slipped  into  the  war- 
technique,  is  now  trying  to  manipulate  him  into 
that  war-technique.  And  my  friend's  idea  of 
patria  does  not  include  the  duty  of  warlike  animus, 
even  when  the  government  decides  such  animus  is 
necessary  to  carry  out  its  theories  of  democracy 
and  the  future  organization  of  the  world.  There 
are  ways  in  which  my  friend  would  probably  be 
willing  to  die  for  his  country.  If  his  death  now 
meant  the  restoration  of  those  ravaged  lands  and 
the  bringing  back  of  the  dead,  that  would  be  a 
cause  to  die  for.  But  he  knows  that  the  dead  can- 
not be  brought  back  or  the  brotherly  currents  re- 
stored. The  work  of  madness  will  not  be  undone. 
Only  a  desperate  war  will  be  prolonged.  Every- 
thing seems  to  him  so  mad  that  there  is  nothing  left 
worth  dying  for.  Pro  patria  mori,  to  my  friend, 
means  something  different  from  lying  gaunt  as  a 
conscript  on  a  foreign  battlefield,  fallen  in  the  last 
desperate  fling  of  an  interminable  world-war. 

[57] 


1  Does  this  mean  that  if  he  is  drafted  he  will 
refuse  to  serve?  I  do  not  know.  It  will  not  be 
any  plea  of  "conscientious  objection"  that  keeps 
him  back.  That  phrase  to  him  has  already  an 
archaic  flavor  which  implies  a  ruling  norm,  a  stiff 
familiar  whom  he  must  obey  in  the  matter.  It 
implies  that  one  would  be  delighted  to  work  up 
one's  blood-lust  for  the  business,  except  that  this 
unaccountable  conscience,  like  a  godly  grand- 
mother, absolutely  forbids.  In  the  case  of  my 
friend,  it  will  not  be  any  objective  "conscience." 
It  will  be  something  that  is  woven  into  his  whole 
modern  philosophic  feel  for  life.  This  is  what 
paralyzes  him  against  taking  one  step  toward  the 
war-machine.  If  he  were  merely  afraid  of  death, 
he  would  seek  some  alternative  service.  But  he 
does  not.  He  remains  passive  and  apathetic, 
waiting  for  the  knife  to  fall.  There  is  a  growing 
cynicism  in  him  about  the  brisk  and  inept  "bustle 
of  war-organization.  His  attitude  suggests  that 
if  he  is  worked  into  war-service,  he  will  have  to  be 
corerced  every  step  of  the  way. 

Yet  he  may  not  even  rebel.     He  may  go  silently 

[58] 


into  the  ranks  in  a  mood  of  cold  contempt.  His 
horror  of  useless  sacrifice  may  make  even  the 
bludgeoning  of  himself  seem  futile.  He  may  go 
in  the  mood  of  so  many  young  men  in  the  other 
countries,  without  enthusiasm,  without  idealism, 
without  hope  and  without  belief,  victims  of  a 
tragically  blind  force  behind  them.  No  other 
government,  however,  has  had  to  face  from  the 
very  start  quite  this  appalling  skepticism  of  youth. 
My  friend  is  significant  because  all  the  shafts  of 
panic,  patriotism  and  national  honor  have  been 
discharged  at  him  without  avail.  All  the  seduc- 
tions of  "liberal"  idealism  leave  him  cold.  He  is 
to  be  susceptible  to  nothing  but  the  use  of  crude, 
rough,  indefeasible  violence.  Nothing  could  be 
more  awkward  for  a  "democratic"  President  than 
to  be  faced  with  this  cold,  staring  skepticism  of 
youth,  in  the  prosecution  of  his  war.  The  attitude 
of  my  ffiend  suggests  that  there  is  a  personal  and 
social  idealism  in  America  which  is  out  of  reach 
of  the  most  skillful  and  ardent  appeals  of  the 
older  order,  an  idealism  that  cannot  be  hurt  by 
the  taunts  of  cowardice  and  slacking  or  kindled  by 

[59] 


the  slogans  of  capitalistic  democracy.  This  is  the 
cardinal  fact  of  our  war — the  non-mobilization  of 
the  younger  intelligentsia. 

What  will  they  do  to  my  friend*?  If  the  war 
goes  on  they  will  need  him.  Pressure  will  change 
skepticism  into  bitterness.  That  bitterness  will 
well  and  grow.  If  the  country  submissively  pours 
month  after  month  its  wealth  of  life  and  resources 
into  the  work  of  annihilation,  that  bitterness  will 
spread  out  like  a  stain  over  the  younger  American 
generation.  If  the  enterprise  goes  on  endlessly, 
the  work,  so  blithely  undertaken  for  the  defense 
of  democracy,  will  have  crushed  out  the  only 
genuinely  precious  thing  in  a  nation,  the  hope  and 
ardent  idealism  of  its  youth. 


[60] 


IV 

THE  COLLAPSE  OF  AMERICAN 
STRATEGY 

(August,   1917) 

IN  the  absorbing  business  of  organizing  Ameri- 
can participation  in  the  war,  public  opinion  seems 
to  be  forgetting  the  logic  of  that  participation.  It 
was  for  the  purpose  of  realizing  certain  definite 
international  ideals  that  the  American  democracy  , 
consented  to  be  led  into  war.  The  meeting  of 
aggression  seemed  to  provide  the  immediate  pre- 
text, but  the  sincere  intellectual  support  of  the 
war  came  from  minds  that  hoped  ardently  for  an 
international  order  that  would  prevent  a  recur- 
rence of  world-war.  Our  action-  they  saw  as 
efficacious  toward  that  end.  It  was  almost  wholly 
upon  this  ground  that  they  justified  it  and  them- 
selves. The  strategy  which  they  suggested  was 

[61] 


very  carefully  worked  out  to  make  our  participa- 
tionr^ount  heavily  toward  the  realization  of  their 
ideals.  Their  justification  and  their  strategy  alike 
were  inseparably  bound  up  with  those  ideals.  It 
was  implicit  in  their  position  that  any  alteration 
in  the  ideals  would  affect  the  strategy  and  would 
cast  suspicion  upon  their  justification.  Similarly 
any  alteration  in  the  strategy  would  make  this 
liberal  body  of  opinion  suspicious  of  the  devotion 
of  the  Government  to  those  ideals,  and  would  tend 
to  deprive  the  American  democracy  of  any  con- 
fident morale  it  might  have  had  in  entering  the 
war.  The  American  case  hung  upon  the  con- 
tinued perfect  working  partnership  of  ideals, 
strategy  and  morale.  ,  v 

In  the  eyes  of  all  but  the  most  skeptical  radicals, 
American  entrance  into  the  war  seemed  to  be 
marked  by  a  singularly  perfect  union  of  these 
three  factors.  The  President's  address  to  Con- 
gress on  April  2,  supported  by  the  December  Peace 
note  and  the  principles  of  the  famous  Senate  ad- 
dress, gave  the  Government  and  American 
"liberalism"  an  apparently  unimpeachable  case. 
A  nation  which  had  resisted  for  so  long  a  time  the 

[62] 


undertow  of  war,  which  had  remained  passive  be- 
fore so  many  provocations  and  incitements,  needed 
the  clearest  assurance  of  unselfish  purpose  to  carry 
it  through  the  inevitable  chaos  and  disillusionment 
of  adopting  a  war-technique.  That  moment 
seemed  to  give  this  assurance.  But  it  needed  not 
only  a  clear,  but  a  steady  and  unwavering  assur- 
ance. It  had  to  see  day  by  day,  in  each  move  of 
war-policy  which  the  Administration  made,  an 
unmistakable  step  toward  the  realization  of  the 
ideals  for  which  the  American  people  had  con- 
sented to  come  into  the  war.  American  hesitation 
was  overcome  only  by  an  apparently  persuasive 
demonstration  that  priceless  values  of  civilization 
were  at  stake.  The  American  people  could  only 
be  prevented  from  relapsing  into  their  first  hesita- 
tion, and  so  demoralizing  the  conduct  of  the  war, 
by  the  sustained  conviction  that  the  Administra- 
tion and  the  Allied  governments  were  fighting 
single-mindedly  for  the  conservation  of  those 
values.  It  is  therefore  pertinent  to  ask  how  this 
conviction  has  been  sustained  and  how  accurately 
American  strategy  has  been  held  to  the  justifying 
of  our  participation  in  the  war.  It  is  pertinent  to 


ask  whether  the  prevailing  apathy  may  not  be  due 
to  the  progressive  weakening  of  the  assurance  that 
our  war  is  being  in  any  way  decisive  in  the  securing 
of  the  values  for  which  we  are  presumably  fighting. 
It  will  not  be  forgotten  that  the  original  logic 
of  American  participation  hung  primarily  upon 
the  menace  of  Germany's  renewed  submarine 
campaign.  The  case  for  America's  entrance  be- 
came presumably  irresistible  only  when  the  safety 
of  the  British  Commonwealth  and  of  the  Allies 
and  neutrals  who  use  the  Atlantic  highway  was  at 
stake.  American  liberal  opinion  had  long  ago  de- 
cided that  the  logic  of  our  moral  neutrality  had 
passed.  American  isolation  was  discredited  as  it 
became  increasingly  evident  how  urgent  was  our 
duty  to  participate  in  the  covenant  of  nations 
which  it  was  hoped  would  come  out  of  the  settle- 
ment. We  were  bound  to  contribute  our  re- 
sources and  our  good-will  to  this  enterprise.  Our 
position  made  it  certain  that  however  we  acted  we 
'should  be  the  deciding  factor.  But  up  to  Feb- 
ruary first,  1917,  it  was  still  an  arguable  question 
in  the  minds  of  "liberals"  whether  we  could  best 
make  that  contribution  through  throwing  in  our  lot 

[64] 


with  the  more  pacific  nations  or  by  continuing  a 
neutrality  benevolent  toward  their  better  cause. 
For  this  benevolent  neutrality,  however  strained, 
was  still  endurable,  particularly  when  supple- 
mented by  the  hope  of  mediation  contained  in  the 
"peace  without  victory"  maneuvers  and  the  prin- 
ciples of  the  Senate  speech. 

This  attempt  to  bring  about  a  negotiated  peace, 
while  the  United  States  was  still  nominally  neu- 
tral, but  able  to  bring  its  colossal  resources  against 
the  side  which  refused  to  declare  its  terms,  marked 
the  highwater  level  of  American  strategy. 

For  a  negotiated  peace,  achieved  before  either 
side  had  reached  exhaustion  and  the  moral  disaster 
was  not  irremediable,  would  have  been  the  most 
hopeful  possible  basis  for  the  covenant  of  nations. 
And  the  United  States,  as  the  effective  agent  in 
such  a  negotiated  peace  and  as  the  most  powerful 
neutral,  might  have  assumed  undisputed  leader- 
ship in  such  a  covenant. 

The  strategy  of  "peace  without  victory"  failed 
because  of  the  refusal  of  Germany  to  state  her 
terms.  The  war  went  on  from  sheer  lack  of  a 
common  basis  upon  which  to  work  out  a  settle- 

[65] 


ment.  American  strategy  then  involved  the  per- 
sistent pressure  of  mediation.  The  submarine 
menace,  however,  suddenly  forced  the  issue.  The 
safety  of  the  seas,  the  whole  Allied  cause,  seemed 
suddenly  in  deadly  peril.  In  the  emergency  be- 
nevolent neutrality  collapsed.  Liberal  opinion 
could  find  no  other  answer  to  the  aggression  than 
war.  In  the  light  of  the  sequel  those  radicals  who 
advocated  a  policy  of  "armed  neutrality"  seem 
now  to  have  a  better  case.  For  American  action 
obtained  momentum  from  the  imminence  of  the 
peril.  The  need  was  for  the  immediate  guarantee 
of  food  and  ships  to  the  menaced  nations  and  for 
the  destruction  of  the  attacking  submarines. 
"Armed  neutrality"  suggested  a  way  of  dealing 
promptly  and  effectively  with  the  situation.  The 
providing  of  loans,  food,  ships,  convoys,  could  os- 
tensibly have  taken  place  without  a  declaration  of 
war,  and  without  developing  the  country's  morale 
or  creating  a  vast  military  establishment.  It  was 
generally  believed  that  time  was  the  decisive 
factor.  The  decision  for  war  has  therefore  meant 
an  inevitable  and  perhaps  fatal  course  of  delay. 
It  was  obvious  that  with  our  well-known  unpre- 
[66] 


paredness  of  administrative  technique,  the  lack  of 
coordination  in  industry,  and  the  unreadiness  of 
the  people  and  Congress  for  coercion,  war  meant 
the  practical  postponement  of  action  for  months. 
In  such  an  emergency  that  threatened  us,  our  only 
chance  to  serve  was  in  concentrating  our  powers. 
Until  the  disorganization  inherent  in  a  pacific  de- 
mocracy was  remedied,  our  only  hope  of  effective 
aid  would  come  from  focusing  the  country's 
energies  on  a  ship  and  food  programme,  supple- 
mented by  a  naval  programme  devised  realistically 
to  the  direct  business  at  hand.  The  war  could  be 
most  promptly  ended  by  convincing  the  German 
government  that  the  submarine  had  no  chance  of 
prevailing  against  the  endless  American  succor 
which  was  beginning  to  raise  the  siege  and  clear 
the  seas. 

The  decision,  however,  was  for  war,  and  for  a 
"thorough"  war.  This  meant  the  immediate 
throwing  upon  the  national  machinery  of  far  more 
activity  than  it  could  handle.  It  meant  attaching 
to  a  food  and  ship  programme  a  military  pro- 
gramme, a  loan  programme,  a  censorship  pro- 
gramme. All  these  latter  have  involved  a  vast" 

[67] 


amount  of  advertising,  of  agitation,  of  discussion, 
and  dissension.  The  country's  energies  and  at- 
tention have  been  drained  away  from  the  simple 
exigencies  of  the  situation  and  from  the  technique 
of  countering  \he  submarine  menace  and  ending 
the  war.  Five  months  have  passed  since  the  be- 
ginning of  unrestricted  submarine  warfare.  We 
have  done  nothing  to  overcome  the  submarine. 
The  food  and  ship  programmes  are  still  uncon- 
solidated.  The  absorption  of  Congress  and  the 
country  in  the  loan  and  the  conscript  army  and 
the  censorship  has  meant  just  so  much  less  absorp- 
tion in  thfe  vital  kapd  urgent  technique  to  provide 
which  we  entered  the  war.  The  country  has  been 
put  to  work  at  a  vast  number  of  activities  which 
are  consonant  to  the  abstract  condition  of  war,  but 
which  may  have  little  relation  to  the  particular 
situation  in  which  this  country  found  itself  and  to 
the  particular  strategy  required.  The  immediate 
task  was  to  prevent  German  victory  in  order  to 
restore  the  outlines  of  our  strategy  toward  a  nego- 
tiated peace.  War  has  been  impotent  in  that  im- 
mediate task.  Paradoxically,  therefore,  our 
very  participation  'was  a  means  of  weakening  our 
„  [68] 


strategy.  We  have  not  overcome  the  submarine 
or  freed  the  Atlantic  world.  Our  entrance  has 
apparently  made  not  a  dent  in  the  morale  of  the 
German  people.  The  effect  of  our  entrance,  it 
was  anticipated  by  liberals,  would  be  the  shorten- 
ing of  the  war.  Our  entrance  has  rather  tended 
to  prolong  it.  Liberals  were  mistaken  about  the 
immediate  collapse  of  the  British  Commonwealth. 
It  continued  to  endure  the  submarine  challenge 
without  our  material  aid.  We  find  ourselves, 
therefore,  saddled  with  a  war-technique  which  has 
compromised  rather  than  furthered  our  strategy. 

This  war-technique  compromises  the  outlines  of 
American  strategy  because  instead  of  making  for 
a  negotiated  peace  it  has  had  the  entirely  unex- 
pected result  of  encouraging  those  forces  in  the 
Allied  countries  who  desire  la  victoire  integrate, 
the  "knockout  blow."  In  the  President's  war- 
message  the  country  was  assured  that  the  prin- 
ciples of  the  negotiated  peace  remained  quite  un- 
impaired,. The  strategy  that  underlay  this,  it  will 
be  remembered,  was  to  appeal  to  the  Teutonic 
peoples  over  the  heads  of  their  rulers  with  terms 
so  liberal  that  the  peoples^  would  force  their  gov- 

[69'] 


ernments  'to  make  peace.  The  strategy  of  the 
American  government  was,  while  prosecuting  the 
war,  to  announce  its  war-aims  and  to  persuade  the 
Allies  to  announce  their  war-aims  in  such  terms 
as  would  split  the  peoples  of  the  Central  Powers 
from  their  governments,  thus  bringing  more  demo- 
cratic regimes  that  would  provide  a  fruitful  basis 
for  a  covenant  of  nations.  We  entered  the  war 
with  no  grievances  of  our  own.  It  was  our 
peculiar  role  to  continue  the  initiative  for  peace, 
both  by  unmistakably  showing  our  own  purpose 
for  a  just  peace  based  on  some  kind  of  inter- 
national organization  and  by  wielding  a  steady 
pressure  on  the  Entente  governments  to  ratify  our 
programme.  If  we  lost  this  initiative  for  peace, 
or  if  we  were  unable  or  unwilling  to  press  the 
Entente  toward  an  unmistakable  liberalism,  our 
strategy  broke  down  and  our  justification  for*  en- 
tering the  war  became  seriously  impaired.  For  we 
could  then  be  charged  with  merely  aiding  the  En- 
tente's ambiguous  scheme  of  European  reorganiza- 
tion. 

The  success  of  this  strategy  of  peace  depended 
on  a  stern  disavowal  of  the  illiberal  programmes 

[70] 


of  groups  within  the  Allied  countries  and  a  sym- 
pathetic attitude  toward  the  most  democratic  pro- 
grammes of  groups  within  the  enemy  Powers. 
Anything  which  weakened  either  this  disavowal 
or  tjiis  sympathy  would  imperil  our  American  case. 
As  potential  allies  in  this  strategy  the  American 
government  had  within  the  enemies'  gates  the  fol- 
lowers of  Scheidemann  who  said  at  the  last  sitting 
of  the  Reichstag:  "If  the  Entente  Powers  should 
renounce  all  claims  for  annexation  and  indemnity 
and  if  the  Central  Powers  should  insist  on  con- 
tinuing the  war,  a  revolution  will  certainly  result 
in  Germany."  It  is  not  inconceivable  that  the 
American  government  and  the  German  socialists 
had  at  the  back  of  their  minds  the  same  kind  of  a 
just  peace.  The  fact  that  the  German  socialists 
were  not  opposing  the  German  government  did  not 
mean  that  any  peace  move  in  which  the  former 
were  interested  was  necessarily  a  sinister  Hohen- 
zollern  intrigue.  The  bitterest  enemies  of  Holl- 
weg  were  not  the  radicals  but  the  Pan-Germans 
themselves.  It  is  they  who  were  said  to  be  cir- 
culating manifestoes  through  the  army  threatening 
revolution  unless  their  programme  of  wholesale 

[71] 


annexations  is  carried  out.  Whatever  liberal 
reservoir  of  power  there  is  in  Germany,  therefore, 
remains  in  the  socialist  ranks.  If  there  is  any 
chance  of  liberal  headway  against  the  sinister  Pan- 
German  campaign  it  is  through  this  nucleus  of 
liberal  power.  American  strategy,  if  it  has  to  find 
a  liberal  leverage  in  Germany,  will  have  to  choose 
the  socialist  group  as  against  the  Pan-Germans. 
It  is  not  absolutely  necessary  to  assume  that  the 
support  of  the  Chancellor  by  the  socialist  majority 
is  permanent.  It  is  unplausible  that  the  Scheide- 
mann  group  cooperates  with  the  Government  for 
peace  merely  to  consolidate  the  Junker  and  mili- 
tary class  in  power  after  the  war.  It  is  quite  con- 
ceivable that  the  socialist  majority  desires  peace 
in  order  to  have  a  safe  basis  for  a  liberal  over- 
turn. Revolution,  impossible  while  the  Father- 
land is  in  danger,  becomes  a  practicable  issue  as 
soon  as  war  is  ended.  A  policy  of  aiding  the  Gov- 
ernment in  its  pressure  toward  peace,  in  order  to 
be  in  a  tactical  position  to  control  the  Government 
when  the  war-peril  was  ended,  would  be  an  ex- 
tremely astute  piece  of  statesmanship.  There  is 
no  evidence  that  the  German  socialists  are  incap- 

[72] 


able  of  such  far-sighted  strategy.  Certainly  the 
"German  peace"  of  a  Scheidemann  is  bound  to  be 
entirely  different  from  the  "German  peace"  of  a 
Hindenburg.  This  difference  is  one  of  the  de- 
cisive factors  of  the  American  strategy.  To  ig- 
nore it  is  to  run  the  risk  of  postponing  and  per- 
haps obstructing  the  settlement  of  the  war. 

It  is  these  considerations  that  make  the  refusal 
of  passports  to  the  American  socialists  seem  a  seri- 
ous weakening  of  the  American  strategy.  A  con- 
ference of  responsible  socialists  from  the  different 
countries  might  have  clarified  the  question  how  far 
a  Russian  peace  or  a  Scheidemann  peace  differed 
from  the  structure  of  a  Wilson  peace.  By  deny- 
ing American  participation  in  the  conference,  the 
Administration  apparently  renounced  the  oppor- 
tunity to  make  contact  with  liberal  leverage  in 
Germany.  It  refused  to  take  that  aggressive  step 
in  cleaving  German  opinion  which  was  demanded 
by  its  own  strategy.  It  tended  to  discourage  lib- 
eral opinion  in  Germany  and  particularly  it  dis- 
couraged the  Russian  democracy  which  was  en- 
thusiastic for  a  socialist  conference. 

This  incident  was  symptomatic  of  the  lessened 

[73] 


adjustment  which  the  Administration  has  shown 
toward  the  changing  situation.  It  was  the  hope  of 
the  American  liberals  who  advocated  American 
entrance  into  the  war  that  this  country  would  not 
lose  thereby  its  initiative  for  peace.  They  be- 
lieved that  our  entrance  would  make  our  mediat- 
ing power  actually  stronger.  That  hope  has  been 
disappointed  through  the  unexpected  radicalism  of 
the  new  Russian  government.  The  initiative  for 
peace  was  bound  to  lie  with  the  people  that  most 
wanted  peace  and  was  willing  to  make  the  most 
peremptory  demands  upon  the  Allied  governments 
that  they  state  the  war-aims  that  would  bring  it. 
This  tactic  was  an  integral  part  of  the  origi- 
nal American  strategy.  The  American  liberals 
trusted  the  President  to  use  American  participa- 
tion as  an  instrument  in  liberalizing  the  war-aims 
of  all  the  Allied  governments.  In  the  event,  how- 
ever, it  has  not  been  America  that  has  wanted 
peace  sufficiently  to  be  peremptory  about  it.  It 
has  been  Russia.  The  initiative  for  peace  has 
passed  from  President  Wilson  into  the  hands  of 
the  Council  of  Workmen's  and  Soldiers'  Deputies. 
It  is  the  latter  who  have  brought  the  pressure  to 

[74] 


declare  democratic  war-aims.  It  is  their  dissatis- 
faction with  the  original  Allied  statement  that  has 
brought  these  new,  if  scarcely  more  satisfactory, 
declarations.  In  this  discussion  between  the  Gov- 
ernments regarding  the  restatement  of  war-aims, 
it  was  not  upon  Russia's  side  that  this  country 
found  itself.  The  President's  note  to  Russia  had 
all  the  tone  of  a  rebuke.  It  sounded  like  the  re- 
action of  a  Government  which — supposedly  itself 
the  leader  in  the  campaign  for  a  just  peace — found 
itself  uncomfortably  challenged  to  state  its  own 
sincerity.  The  key  to  our  American  strategy  has 
been  surrendered  to  Russia.  The  plain  fact  is 
that  the  President  has  lost  that  position  of  leader 
which  a  Russian  candor  would  have  retained  for 
him. 

What  is  more  serious  is  that  the  note  to  Russia 
implied  not  only  his  loss  of  the  initiative  for  a 
negotiated  peace  but  even  the  desire  for  it.  "The 
day  has  come  when  we  must  conquer  or  submit." 
This  has  a  very  strange  ring  coming  from  a  Presi- 
dent who  in  his  very  war-message  still  insisted  that 
he  had  not  altered  in  any  way  the  principles  of  his 
"peace  without  victory"  note.  The  note  to  Rus- 

[75-] 


sia  did  not  attempt  to  explain  how  "peace  without 
victory"  was  to  be  reconciled  with  "conquer  or 
submit,"  nor  has  any  such  explanation  been  forth- 
coming. The  implication  is  that  the  entire  strat- 
egy of  the  negotiated  peace  has  passed  out  of 
American  hands  into  those  of  Russia,  and  that  this 
country  is  committed  to  the  new  strategy  of  the 
"knockout  blow."  If  this  is  true,  then  we  have 
the  virtual  collapse  of  the  strategy,  and  with  it 
the  justification,  of  our  entrance  into  the  war. 

Whether  American  strategy  has  changed  or  not, 
the  effect  upon  opinion  in  the  Allied  countries 
seems  to  be  as  if  it  had.  Each  pronouncement  of 
America's  war-aims  is  received  with  disconcerting 
unanimity  in  England,  France  and  Italy  as  ratify- 
ing their  own  aspirations  and  policies.  Any  hint 
that  Allied  policies  disagree  with  ours  is  received 
with  marked  disfavor  by  our  own  loyal  press. 
When  we  entered  the  war,  the  Allied  aims  stood 
as  stated  in  their  reply  to  the  President's  Decem- 
ber note.  This  reply  was  then  interpreted  by 
American  liberals  as  a  diplomatic  programme  of 
maximum  demands.  They  have  therefore  called 
repeatedly  upon  the  President  to  secure  from  the 

[76] 


Allied  governments  a  resolution  of  the  ambiguities 
and  a  revision  of  the  more  extreme  terms,  in  order 
that  we  might  make  common  cause  with  them  to- 
ward a  just  peace.  In  this  campaign  the  American 
liberals  have  put  themselves  squarely  on  the  side 
of  the  new  Russia,  which  has  also  clamored  for  a 
clear  and  liberal  statement  of  what  the  war  is  be- 
ing fought  for.  Unfortunately  the  Administra- 
tion has  been  unable  or  unwilling  to  secure  from 
the  Allies  any  such  resolution  or  revision.  The 
Russian  pressure  has  elicited  certain  statements, 
which,  however,  proved  little  more  satisfactory  to 
the  Russian  radicals  than  the  original  statement. 
Our  own  war-aims  have  been  stated  in  terms  as 
ambiguous  and  unsatisfactory  as  those  of  the  Al- 
lies. Illiberal  opinion  in  the  other  countries  has 
not  been  slow  in  seizing  upon  President  Wilson's 
pronouncements  as  confirming  all  that  their  hearts 
could  wish.  Most  significant  has  been  the  satis- > 
faction  of  Italian  imperialistic  opinion,  the  most 
predatory  and  illiberal  force  in  any  Allied  country. 
The  President  has  done  nothing  to  disabuse  Ital- 
ian minds  of  their  belief.  He  has  made  no  dis- 
avowal of  the  Allied  reactionary  ratification.  The 

[77] 


sharp  divergence  of  interpretation  between  the  Al- 
lied governments  and  the  Russian  radicals  persists. 
In  lieu  of  any  clear  statement  to  the  contrary, 
opinion  in  the  Allied  countries  has  good  ground 
for  believing  that  the  American  government  will 
back  up  whatever  of  their  original  programme  can 
be  carried  through.  Particularly  is  this  true  after 
the  President's  chiding  of  Russia.  The  animus 
behind  the  enthusiasm  for  Pershing  in  France  is 
the  conviction  that  American  force  will  be  the  de- 
cisive factor  in  the  winning  back  of  Alsace-Lor- 
raine. It  .  is  no  mere  sentimental  pleasure  at 
American  alliance.  It  is  an  immense  stiffening 
of  the  determination  to  hold  out  to  the  uttermost, 
to  the  "peace  with  victory"  of  which  Ribot  speaks. 
Deluded  France  carries  on  the  war  to  complete  ex- 
haustion on  the  strength  of  the  American  millions 
who  are  supposedly  rushing  to  save  her.  The  im- 
mediate effect  of  American  participation  in  Eng- 
land and  Italy  as  well  has  been  an  intense  will  to 
hold  out  not  for  the  "peace  without  victory"  but 
pour  la  victoire  integrate,  for  the  conquest  so 
crushing  that  Germany  will  never  be  feared  again. 
Now  the  crux  of  American  strategy  was  the  lib- 

[78] 


eralization  of  Allied  policy  in  order  that  that 
peace  might  be  obtained  which  was  a  hopeful  basis 
for  a  League  of  Nations.  American  participation 
has  evidently  not  gone  one  inch  toward  liberaliz- 
ing the  Allies.  We  are  further  from  the  nego- 
tiated peace  than  we  were  in  December,  though  the 
only  change  in  the  military  and  political  situation 
is  the  Russian  revolution  which  immensely  in- 
creased the  plausibility  of  that  peace.  As  Allied 
hope  of  victory  grows,  the  covenant  of  nations 
fades  into  the  background.  And  it  is  Allied  hope 
of  victory  that  our  participation  has  inflamed  and 
augmented. 

The  President's  Flag  Day  address  marks  with- 
out a  doubt  the  collapse  of  American  strategy. 
That  address,  coupled  with  the  hints  of  "effective 
readjustments"  in  the  note  to  Russia,  implies  that 
America  is  ready  to  pour  out  endless  blood  and 
treasure,  not  to  the  end  of  a  negotiated  peace,  but 
to  the  utter  crushing  of  the  Central  Powers,  to 
their  dismemberment  and  political  annihilation. 
The  war  is  pictured  in  that  address  as  a  struggle  to 
the  death  against  the  military  empire  of  Mittel- 
Europa.  The  American  role  changes  from  that  of 

[79] 


mediator  in  the  interest  of  international  organiza- 
tion to  that  of  formidable  support  to  the  breaking 
of  this  menace  to  the  peace  and  liberty  of  Europe. 
It  will  be  remembered  that  American  liberals  in- 
terpreted our  entrance  into  the  war  as  primarily 
defensive,  an  enterprise  to  prevent  Germany's 
threatened  victory  on  the  sea.  We  came'  in,  not 
to  secure  an  Allied  "peace  with  victory,"  but  to 
prevent  a  German  "peace  with  victory,"  and  so 
restore  the  situation  favorable  to  a  negotiated 
peace.  The  strategy  of  the  negotiated  peace  de- 
pended largely  on  the  belief  that  a  military  de- 
cision was  either  impossible  or  was  not  worth  the 
colossal  sacrifice  it  demanded.  But  it  is  only  as 
the  result  of  a  sweeping  military  decision  that  any 
assured  destruction  of  Mittel-Europa  could  come. 
In  basing  his  case  on  Mittel-Europa,  therefore,  the 
President  has  clearly  swung  from  a  strategy  of 
"peace  without  victory"  to  a  strategy  of  "war  to 
exhaustion  for  the  sake  of  a  military  decision." 
He  implies  that  a  country  which  came  only  after 
hesitation  to  the  defense  of  the  seas  and  the  At- 
lantic world  will  contentedly  pour  out  its  in- 
definite blood  and  treasure  for  the  sake  of  spoiling 

[80] 


the  coalition  of  Mittel-Europa  and  of  making  re- 
adjustments in  the  map  of  Europe  effective  against 
German  influence  on  the  Continent.  Such  an  im- 
plication means  the  "end  of  American  isolation" 
with  a  vengeance.  No  one  can  be  blamed  who 
sees  in  the  Flag  Day  Address  the  almost  unlimited 
countersigning  of  Allied  designs  and  territorial 
schemes. 

The  change  of  American  strategy  to  a  will  for 
a  military  decision  would  explain  the  creation  of 
the  vast  American  army  which  in  the  original  pol- 
icy was  required  only  "as  a  reserve  and  a  precau- 
tion." It  explains  our  close  cooperation  with  the 
Allied  governments  following  the  visits  of  the 
Missions.  An  American  army  of  millions  would 
undoubtedly  be  a  decisive  factor  in  the  remaking 
of  the  map  of  Europe  and  the  permanent  gar- 
risoning of  strategic  points  bearing  upon  Ger- 
many. But  this  change  of  strategy  does  not  ex- 
plain itself.  The  continental  military  and  polit- 
ical situation  has  not  altered  in  any  way  which  jus- 
tines  so  fundamental  an  alteration  in  American 
strategy.  American  liberals  justified  our  entrance 
into  the  war  as  a  response  to  a  sudden  exigency. 

[81] 


But  the  menace  of  Mittel-Europa  has  existed  ever 
since  the  entrance  of  Bulgaria  in  1915.  If  it  now 
challenges  us  and  justifies  our  change  of  strategy, 
it  challenged  us  and  justified  our  assault  a  full  two 
years  ago.  American  shudders  at  its  bogey  are 
doubly  curious  because  it  is  probably  less  of  a  men- 
ace now  than  it  has  ever  been.  President  Wilson 
ignores  the  effect  of  a  democratic  Russia  on  the 
success  of  such  a  military  coalition.  Such  hetero- 
geneous states  could  be  held  together  only  through 
the  pressure  of  a  strong  external  fear.  But  the 

passing  of  predatory  Russia  removes  that  fear. 

* 

Furthermore,  Bulgaria,  the  most  democratic  of  the 
Balkan  States,  would  always  be  an  uncertain  part- 
ner in  such  a  coalition.  Bagdad  has  long  been  in 
British  hands.  There  are  strong  democratic  and 
federalistic  forces  at  work  in  the  Austro-Hunga- 
rian  monarchy.  The  materials  seem  less  ready 
than  ever  for  the  creation  of  any  such  predatory 
and  subjugated  Empire  as  the  Flag  Day  Address 
describes.  Whatever  the  outcome  of  the  war, 
there  is  likely  to  result  an  economic  union  which 
could  bring  needed  civilization  to  neglected  and 
primitive  lands.  But  such  a  union  would  be  a 

[82] 


blessing  to  Europe  rather  than  a  curse.  It  was 
such  a  union  that  England  was  on  the  point  of 
granting  to  Germany  when  the  war  broke  out. 
The  Balkans  and  Asia  Minor  need  German  sci- 
ence, German  organization,  German  industrial  de- 
velopment. We  can  hardly  be  fighting  to  pre- 
vent such  German  influence  in  these  lands.  The 
irony  of  the  President's  words  lies  in  the  fact  that 
the  hopes  of  Mittel-Europa  as  a  military  coalition 
seem  to  grow  dimmer  rather  than  brighter.  He 
must  know  that  this  "enslavement"  of  the  peoples 
of  which  he  speaks  can  only  be  destroyed  by  the 
peoples  themselves  and  not  at  the  imposition  of  a 
military  conqueror.  The  will  to  resist  this  Prus- 
sian enslavement  seems  to  have  been  generated  in 
Austro-Hungary.  The  President's  perspective  is 
belated.  If  our  fighting  to  crush  this  amazing 
plot  is  justified  now,  it  was  more  than  justified  as 
soon  as  Rumania  was  defeated.  The  President 
convicts  himself  of  criminal  negligence  in  not  urg- 
ing us  into  the  war  at  that  time.  If  our  role 
was  to  aid  in  conquest,  we  could  not  have  begun 
our  work  too  soon. 

The  new  strategy  is  announced  by  the  President 

[83] 


in  no  uncertain  terms — "The  day  has  come  when 
we  must  conquer  or  submit."  But  the  strategy  of 
conquest  implies  the  necessity  of  means  for  con- 
solidating the  conquest.  If  the  world  is  to  be 
made  safe  for  democracy,  democracy  must  to  a 
certain  extent  be  imposed  on  the  world.  There  is 
little  point  in  conquering  unless  you  carry  through 
the  purposes  for  which  you  have  conquered.  The 
earlier  American  strategy  sought  to  bring  democ- 
racy to^Germany  by  appealing  directly  to  the  dem- 
ocratic forces  in  Germany  itself.  We  relied  on  a 
self-motivated  regeneration  on  the  part  of  our  en- 
emy. We  believed  that  democracy  could  be  im- 
posed only  from  within.  If  the  German  people 
cannot  effect  their  own  political  reorganization, 
nobody  can  do  it  for  them.  They  would  continue 
to  prefer  the  native  Hohenzollerns  to  the  most 
liberal  government  imposed  by  their  conquering 
enemies.  A  Germany  forced  to  be  democratic  un- 
der the  tutelage  of  a  watchful  and  victorious  En- 
tente would  indeed  be  a  constant  menace  to  the 
peace  of  Europe.  Just  so  far  then  as  our  changed 
American  strategy  contributes  toward  a  conquest 
over  Germany,  it  will  work  against  our  desire  to 

[84] 


see  that  country  spontaneously  democratized. 
There  is  reason  for  hope  that  democracy  will  not 
have  to  be  forced  on  Germany.  *  From  the  present 
submission  of  the  German  people  to  the  war-re- 
gime nothing  can  be  deduced  as  to  their  subservi- 
ency after  the  war.  Prodigious  slaughter  will 
effect  profound  social  changes.  There  may  be  go- 
ing on  a  progressive  selection  in  favor  of  demo- 
cratic elements.  The  Russian  army  was  trans- 
formed into  a  democratic  instrument  by  the  wip- 
ing-out  in  battle  of  the  upper-class  officers.  Men 
of  democratic  and  revolutionary  sympathies  took 
their  places.  A  similar  process  may  happen  in 
the  German  army.  The  end  of  the  war  may 
leave  the  German  "army  of  the  people"  a  genu- 
ine popular  army  intent  upon  securing  control 
of  the  civil  government.  Furthermore,  the  con- 
tinuance of  Pan-German  predatory  imperialism 
depends  on  a  younger  generation  of  Junkers  to  re- 
place the  veterans  now  in  control.  The  most  dar- 
ing of  those  aristocrats  will  almost  certainly  have, 
been  destroyed  in  battle.  The  mortality  in  up- 
per-class leadership  will  certainly  have  proved  far 
larger  than  the  mortality  in  lower-class  leadership. 

[85] 


The  maturing  of  these  tendencies  is  the  hope  of 
German  democracy.  A  speedy  ending  of  the  war, 
before  the  country  is  exhausted  and  the  popular 
morale  destroyed,  is  likely  best  to  mature  these 
tendencies.  In  this  light  it  is  almost  immaterial 
what  terms  are  made.  Winning  or  losing,  Ger- 
many cannot  replace  her  younger  generation  of 
the  ruling  class.  And  without  a  ruling  class  to 
continue  the  imperial  tradition,  democracy  could 
scarcely  be  delayed.  An  enfeebled  ruling  class 
could  neither  hold  a  vast  world  military  Empire 
together  nor  resist  the  revolutionary  elements  at 
home.  The  prolongation  of  the  war  delays  de- 
mocracy in  Germany  by  convincing  the  German 
people  that  they  are  fighting  for  their  very  exist- 
ence and  thereby  forcing  them  to  cling  even  more 
desperately  to  their  military  leaders.  In  an- 
nouncing an  American  strategy  of  "conquer  or 
submit,"  the  President  virtually  urges  the  German 
people  to  prolong  the  war.  And  not  only  are  the 
German  people,  at  the  apparent  price  of  their  ex- 
istence, tacitly  urged  to  continue  the  fight  to  the 
uttermost,  but  the  Allied  governments  are  tacitly 
urged  to  wield  the  "knockout  blow."  All  those 
[86] 


i 


reactionary  elements  in  England,  France  and 
Italy,  whose  spirits  drooped  at  the  President's  or- 
iginal bid  for  a  negotiated  peace,  now  take  heart 
again  at  this  apparent  countersigning  of  their  most 
extreme  programmes. 

American  liberals  who  urged  the  nation  to  war 
are  therefore  suffering  the  humiliation  of  seeing 
their  liberal  strategy  for  peace  transformed  into  a 
strategy  for  prolonged  war.  This  government 
was  to  announce  such  war-aims  as  should  persuade 

the  peoples  of  the  Central  Powers  to  make  an  irre- 

i 

sistible  demand  for  a  democratic  peace.  Our  in- 
itiative with  the  Allied  governments  was  to  make 
this  peace  the  basis  of  an  international  covenant, 
"the  creation  of  a  community  of  limited  independ- 
encies," of  which  Norman  Angell  speaks.  Those 
Americans  who  opposed  our  entrance  into  the  war 
believed  that  this  object  could  best  be  worked  for 
by  a  strategy  of  continued  neutrality  and  the  con- 
stant pressure  of  mediation.  They  believed  that 
war  would  defeat  the  strategy  for  a  liberal  peace. 
The  liberal  intellectuals  who  supported  the  Presi- 
dent felt  that  only  by  active  participation  on  an 
independent  basis  could  their  purposes  be 


achieved.  The  event  has  signally  betrayed  them. 
We  have  not  ended  the  submarine  menace.  We 
have  lost  all  power  for  mediation.  We  have  not 
even  retained  the  democratic  leadership  among  the 
Allied  nations.  We  have  surrendered  the  initia- 
tive for  peace.  We  have  involved  ourselves  in  a 
moral  obligation  to  send  large  armies  to  Europe 
to  secure  a  military  decision  for  the  Allies.  We 
have  prolonged  the  war.  We  have  encouraged 
the  reactionary  elements  in  every  Allied  country 
to  hold  out  for  extreme  demands.  We  have  dis- 
couraged the  German  democratic  forces.  Our 
strategy  has  gradually  become  indistinguishable 
from  that  of  the  Allies.  With  the  arrival  of  the 
British  Mission  our  "independent  basis"  became  a 
polite  fiction.  The  President's  Flag  Day  Address 
merely  registers  the  collapse  of  American  strategy. 
All  this  the  realistic  pacifists  foresaw  when  they 
held  out  so  bitterly  and  unaccountably  against  our 
entering  the  war.  The  liberals  felt  a  nai've  faith 
in  the  sagacity  of  the  President  to  make  their  strat- 
egy prevail.  They  looked  to  him  single-handedly 
to  liberalize  the  liberal  nations.  They  trusted 
him  to  use  a  war-technique  which  should  consist  of 
[88] 


an  olive-branch  in  one  hand  and  a  sword  in  the 
other.  They  have  had  to  see  their  strategy  col- 
lapse under  the  very  weight  of  that  war-technique. 
Guarding  neutrality,  we  might  have  counted  to- 
ward a  speedy  and  democratic  peace.  In  the  war, 
we  are  a  rudderless  nation,  to  be  exploited  as  the 
Allies  wish,  politically  and  materially,  and  towed, 
to  their  aggrandizement,  in  any  direction  which 
they  may  desire. 


[89] 


A  WAR  DIARY 

(September,   1917) 

i 

TIME  brings  a  better  adjustment  to  the  war. 
There  had  been  so  many  times  when,  to  those 
who  had  energetically  resisted  its  coming,  it 
seemed  the  last  intolerable  outrage.  In  one's 
wilder  moments  one  expected  revolt  against  the 
impressment  of  unwilling  men  and  the  suppression 
of  unorthodox  opinion.  One  conceived  the  war 
as  "breaking  down  through  a  kind  of  intellectual 
sabotage  diffused  through  the  country.  But  as 
one  talks  to  people  outside  the  cities  and  away 
from  ruling  currents  of  opinion,  one  finds  the  pre- 
vailing apathy  shot  everywhere  with  acquiescence. 
The  war  is  a  bad  business,  which  somehow  got 
fastened  on  us.  They  don't  want  to  go,  but 
they've  got  to  go.  One  decides  that  nothing  gen- 

[90] 


erally  obstructive  is  going  to  happen  and  that  it 
would  make  little  difference  if  it  did.  The  kind 
of  war  which  we  are  conducting  is  an  enterprise 
which  the  American  government  does  not  have  to 
carry  on  with  the  hearty  cooperation  of  the  Ameri- 
can people  but  only  with  their  acquiescence.  And 
that  acquiescence  seems  sufficient  to  float  an  in- 
definitely protracted  war  for  vague  or  even  largely 
uncomprehended  and  unaccepted  purposes.  Our 
resources  in  men  and  materials  are  vast  enough  to 
organize  the  war-technique  without  enlisting  more 
than  a  fraction  of  the  people's  conscious  energy. 
Many  men  will  not  like  being  sucked  into  the  ac- 
tual fighting  organism,  but  as  the  war  goes  on  they 
will  be  sucked  in  as  individuals  and  they  will 
yield.  There  is  likely  to  be  no  element  in  the 
.  country  with  the  effective  will  to  help  them  resist. 
They  are  not  likely  to  resist  of  themselves  con- 
certedly.  They  will  be  licked  grudgingly  into 
military  shape,  and  their  lack  of  enthusiasm  will 
in  no  way  unfit  them  for  use  in  the  hecatombs  nec- 
essary for  the  military  decision  upon  which  Allied 
political  wisdom  still  apparently  insists.  It  is  un- 
likely that  enough  men  will  be  taken  from  the  po- 

[91] 


tentially  revolting  classes  seriously  to  embitter 
their  spirit.  Losses  in  the  well-to-do  classes  will 
be  sustained  by  a  sense  of  duty  and  of  reputable 
sacrifice.  From  the  point  of  view  of  the  worker, 
it  will  make  little  difference  whether  his  work  con- 
tributes to  annihilation  overseas  or  to  construction 
at  home.  Temporarily,  his  condition  is  better  if 
it  contributes  to  the  former.  We  of  the  middle 
classes  will  be  progressively  poorer  than  we  should 
otherwise  have  been.  Our  lives  will  be  slowly 
drained  by  clumsily  levied  taxes  and  the  robberies 
of  imperfectly  controlled  private  enterprises. 
'But  this  will  not  cause  us  to  revolt.  There  are 
nbt  likely  to  be  enough  hungry  stomachs  to  make  a 
revolution.  The  materials  seem  generally  absent 
from  the  country,  and  as  long  as  a  government: 
wants  to  use  the  war-technique  in  its  realization 
of  great  ideas,  it  can  count  serenely  on  the  human 
resources  of  the  country,  regardless  of  popular 
mandate  or  understanding. 

ii 

If  human  resources  are  fairly  malleable  into  the 
war-technique,  our  material  resources  will  prove 

[92] 


to  be  even  more  so,  quite  regardless  of  the  indi- 
vidual patriotism  of  their  owners  or  workers.  It 

is  almost  purely  a  problem  of  diversion.     Fac- 

s  •—• 
tories  and  mines  and  farms  will  continue  to  turn  \ 

out  the  same  products  and  at  an  intensified  rate, 
but  the  government  will  be  working  to  use  their 
activity  and  concentrate  it  as  contributory  to  the 
war.  The  process  which  the  piping  times  of  be- 
nevolent neutrality  began  will  be  pursued  to  its 
extreme  end.  All  this  will  be  successful,  how- 
ever, precisely  as  it  is  made  a  matter  of  centralized 
governmental  organization  and  not  of  individual 
offerings  of  goodwill  and  enterprise.  It  will  be 
coercion  from  above  that  will  do  the  trick  rather 
than  patriotism  from  below.  Democratic  con- 
tentment may  be  shed  over  the  land  for  a  time 
through  the  appeal  to  individual  thoughtfulness  in 
saving  and  in  relinquishing  profits.  But  all  that 
is  really  needed  is  the  cooperation  with  govern- 
ment of  the  men  who  direct  the  large  financial 
and  industrial  enterprises.  If  their  interest  is  en- 
listed in  diverting  the  mechanism  of  production 
into  war-channels,  it  makes  not  the  least  difference 
whether  you  or  I  want  our  activity  to  count  in  aid  / 

[93] 


of  the  war.  Whatever  we  do  will  contribute  to- 
ward its  successful  organization,  and  toward  the 
„  riveting  of  a  semi-military  State-socialism  oh  the 
,  country.  As  long  as  the  effective  managers,  the 
"big  men"  in  the  staple  industries  remained  loyal, 
nobody  need  care  what  the  millions  of  little  hu- 
man cogs  who  had  to  earn  their  living  felt  or 
thought.  This  is  why  the  technical  organization 
for  this  American  war  goes  on  so  much  more  rap- 
idly than  any  corresponding  popular  sentiment  for 
its  aims  and  purposes.  Our  war  is  teaching  us 
that  patriotism  is  really  a  superfluous  quality  in 
war.  The  government  of  a  modern  organized 
plutocracy  does  not  have  to  ask  whether  the  people 
want  to  fight  or  understand  what  they  are  fighting 
for,  but  only  whether  they  will  tolerate  fighting. 
America  does  not  cooperate  with  the  President's 
designs.  She  rather  feebly  acquiesces.  But  that 
feeble  acquiescence  is  the  all-important  factor. 
We  are  learning  that  war  doesn't  need  enthusiasm, 
doesn't  need  conviction,  doesn't  need  hope,  to  sus- 
tain it.  Once  maneuvered,  it  takes  care  of  itself, 
provided  only  that  our  industrial  rulers  see  that 
*f  the  end  of  the  war  will  leave  American  capital  in 

[  94  ] 


a   strategic   position    for    world-enterprise.     The-.- 
American  people  might  be  much  more  indifferent  " 
to  the  war  even  than  they  are  and  yet  the  results 
would  not  be  materially  different.     A  majority  of  ^ 
them  might  even  be  feebly  or  at  least  unconcert- 
edly  hostile  to  the  war,  and  yet  it  would  go  gaily  ' 
on.     That  is  why  a  popular  referendum  seems  so 
supremely  irrelevant  to  people  who  are  willing  to 
use  war  as  an  instrument  in  the  working-out  of 
national  policy.     And  that  is  why  this  war,  with 
apathy  rampant,  is  probably  going  to  act  just  as  if 
every  person  in  the  country  were  filled  with  pa- 
triotic ardor,  and  furnished  with  a  completely  as- 
similated map  of  the  League  to  Enforce  Peace. 
If  it  doesn't,  the  cause  will  not  be  the  lack  of  pop- 
ular ardor,  but  the  clumsiness  of  the  government 
officials  in  organizing  the  technique  of  the  war. 
Our  country  in  war,  given  efficiency  at  the  top,  can  - 
do  very  well  without  our  patriotism.     The  non- 
patriotic  man  need  feel  no  pangs  of  conscience 
about  not  helping  the  war.     Patriotism  fades  into 
the  merest  trivial  sentimentality  when  it  becomes, 
as  so  obviously  in  a  situation  like  this,  so  pragmat-' 
ically  impotent.     As  long  as  one  has  to  earn  one's 

[95] 


living  or  buy  tax-ridden  goods,  one  is  making  one's 
contribution  to  war  in  a  thousand  indirect  ways. 
The  war,  since  it  does  not  need  it,  cannot  fairly 
demand  also  the  sacrifice  of  one's  spiritual  integ- 
rity. 

in 

The  "liberals"  who  claim  a  realistic  and  prag- 
matic attitude  in  politics  have  disappointed  us  in 
setting  up  and  then  clinging  wistfully  to  the  belief 
that  our  war  could  get  itself  justified  for  an  ideal- 
istic flavor,  or  at  least  for  a  world-renovating 
social  purpose,  that  they  had  more  or  less  denied 
to  the  other  belligerents.  If  these  realists  had  had 
time  in  the  hurry  and  scuffle  of  events  to  turn  their 
philosophy  on  themselves,  they  might  have  seen 
how  Jthinly  disguised  a  rationalization  this  was  of 
their  emotional  undertow.  They  wanted  a 
League  of  Nations.  They  had  an  unanalyzable 
feeling  that  thi$  was  a  war  in  which  we  had  to  be, 
and  be  in  it  we  would.  What  more  natural  than 
to  join  the  two  ideas  and  conceive  our  war  as  the 
decisive  factor  in  the  attainment  of  the  desired 
end !  This  gave  them  a  good  conscience  for  will- 
ing American  participation,  although  as  good  men 

[96] 


they  must  have  loathed  war  and  everything  con- 
nected with  it.  The  realist  cannot  deny  facts. 
Moreover,  he  must  not  only  acknowledge  them  but  , 
he  must  use  them.  Good  or  bad,  they  must  be 
turned  by  his  intelligence  to  some  constructive 
end.  Working  along  with  the  materials  which 
events  give  him,  he  must  get  where  and  what  he 
can,  and  bring  something  brighter  and  better  out 
of  the  chaos. 

Now  war  is  such  an  indefeasible  and  unescap- 
able  Real  that  the  good  realist  must  accept  it 
rather  comprehensively.  To  keep  out  of  it  is  pure 
quietism,  an  acute  moral  failure  to  adjust.  At  the 
same  time,  there  is  an  inexorability  about  war. 
It  is  a  little  unbridled  for  the  realist's  rather  nice 
sense  of  purposive  social  control.  And  nothing  is 
so  disagreeable  to  the  pragmatic  mind  as  any  kind 
of  an  absolute.  The  realistic  pragmatist  could 
not  recognize  war  as  inexorable — though  to  the 
common  mind  it  would  seem  as  near  an  absolute, 
coercive  social  situation  as  it  is  possible  to  fall  into. 
For  the  inexorable  abolishes  choices,^and  it  is  the 
essence  of  the  realist's  creed  to  have,  in  every  sit- 
uation, alternatives  before  him.  He  gets  out  of 

[97] 


his  scrape  in  this  way :  Let  the  inexorable  roll  in 
upon  me,  since  it  must.  But  then,  keeping  firm 
my  sense  of  control,  I  will  somehow  tame  it  and 
turn  it  to  my  own  creative  purposes.  Thus  real- 
ism is  justified  of  her  children,  and  the  "liberal" 
is  saved  from  the  limbo  of  the  wailing  and  irre- 

4*M 

concilable  pacifists  who  could  not  make  so  easy  an 
adjustment. 

Thus  the  "liberals"  who  made  our  war  their 
own  preserved  their  pragmatism.  But  events 
have  shown  how  fearfully  they  imperilled  their 
intuition  and  how  untameable  an  inexorable  really 
is.  For  those  of  us  who  knew  a  real  inexorable 
when  we  saw  one,  and  had  learned  from  watching 
war  what  follows  the  loosing  of  a  war-technique, 
foresaw  how  quickly  aims  and  purposes  would  be 
forgotten,  and  how  flimsy  would  be  any  liberal 
control  of  events.  It  is  only  we  now  who  can  ap- 
C  preciate  The  New  Republic — the  organ  of  ap- 
•  plied  pragmatic  realism — when  it  complains  that 
the  League  of  Peace  (which  we  entered  the  war 
to  guarantee)  is  more  remote  than  it  was  eight 
months  ago;  or  that  our  State  Department  has  no 
diplomatic  policy  (though  it  was  to  realize  the 

[98] 


high  aims  of  the  President's  speeches  that  the  in- 
tellectuals willed  American  participation)  ;  or  that 
we  are  subordinating  the  political  management  of 
the  war  to  real  or  supposed  military  advantages, 
(though  militarism  in  the  liberal  mind  had  no  jus- 
tification except  as  a  tool  for  advanced  social 
ends).  If  after  all  the  idealism  and  creative  in- 
telligence that  were  shed  upon  America's  taking  up 
of  arms,  our  State  Department  has  no  policy,  we 
are  like  brave  passengers  who  have  set  out  for  the 
Isles  of  the  Blest  only  to  find  that  the  first  mate 
has  gone  insane  and  jumped  overboard,  the  rudder 
has  come  loose  and  dropped  to  the  bottom  of  the 
sea,  and  the  captain  and  pilot  are  lying  dead  drunk 
under  the  wheel.  The  stokers  and  engineers, 
however,  are  still  merrily  forcing  the  speed  up  to 
twenty  knots  an  hour  and  the  passengers  are  pre- 
sumably getting  the  pleasure  of  the  ride. 

IV 

The  penalty  the  realist  pays  for  accepting  war 
is  to  see  disappear  one  by  one  the  justifications  for 
accepting  it.  He  must  either  become  a  genuine 
Realpolitiker  and  brazen  it  'through,  or  else  he 

[99] 


must  feel  sorry  for  his  intuition  and  regretful  that 
he  willed  the  war.  But  so  easy  is  forgetting  and 
so  slow  the  change  of  events  'that  he  is  more  likely 
to  ignore  the  collapse  of  his  case.  If  he  finds  that 
his  government  is  relinquishing  the  crucial  moves 
of  that  strategy  for  which  he  was  willing  to  use  the 
technique  of  war,  he  is  likely  to  move  easily  to  the 
ground  that  it  will  all  come  out  in  the  end  the  same 
anyway.  He  soon  becomes  satisfied  with  tacitly 
ratifying  whatever  happens,  or  at  least  straining 
to  find  the  grain  of  unplausible  hope  that  may 
be  latent  in  the  situation. 

But  what  then  is  there  really  to  choose  between 
the  realist  who  accepts  evil  in  order  to  manipulate 
it  to  a  great  end,  but  who  somehow  unaccount- 
ably finds  events  turn  sour  on  him.  and  the  Uto- 
pian pacifist  who  cannot  stomach  the  evil  and  will 
have  none  of  it"?  Both  are  helpless,  both  are 
coerced.  The  Utopian,  however,  knows  that  he  is 
ineffective  and  that  he  is  coerced,  while  the  realist, 
evading  disillusionment,  moves  in  a  twilight  zone 
of  half-hearted  criticism,  and  hopings  for  the  best, 
where  he  does  not  become  a  tacit  fatalist.  The 
latter  would  be  the  manlier  position,  but  then 
[100] 


where  would  be  his  realistic  philosophy  of  intelli- 
gence and  choice?  Professor  Dewey  has  become 
impatient  at  the  merely  good  and  merely  consci- 
entious objectors  to  war  who  do  not  attach  their 
conscience  and  intelligence  to  forces  moving  in  an- 
other direction.  But  in  wartime  there  are  liter- 
ally no  valid  forces  moving  in  another  direction. 
War  determines  its  own  end — victory,  and  govern- 
ment crushes  out  automatically  all  forces  that  de- 
flect, or  threaten  to  deflect,  energy  from  the  path 
of  organization  to  that  end.  All  governments 
will  act  in  this  way,  the  most  democratic  as  well 
as  the  most  autocratic.  It  is  only  "liberal" 
naivete  that  is  shocked  at  arbitrary  coercion  and 
suppression.  Willing  war  means  willing  all  the 
evils  that  are  organically  bound  up  with  it.  A 
good  many  people  still  seem  to  believe  in  a  pe- 
culiar kind  of  democratic  and  antiseptic  war. 
The  pacifists  opposed  the  war  because  they  knew 
this  was  an  illusion,  and  because  of  the  myriad 
hurts  they  knew  war  would  do  the  promise  of  de- 
mocracy at  home.  For  once  the  babes  and  suck- 
lings seem  to  have  been  wiser  than  the  children  of 
light. 

[101] 


V 

If  it  is  true  that  the  war  will  go  on  anyway 
whether  it  is  popular  or  not  or  whether  its  pur- 
poses are  clear,  and  if  it  is  true  that  in  wartime  con- 
structive realism  is  an  illusion,  then  the  aloof  man, 
the  man  who  will  not  obstruct  the  war  but  who 
cannot  spiritually  accept  it,  has  a  clear  case  for 
himself.  Our  war  presents  no  more  extraordinary 
phenomenon  than  the  number  of  the  more  creative 
minds  of  the  younger  generation  who  are  still  ir- 
reconcilable toward  the  great  national  enterprise 
which  the  government  has  undertaken.  The 
country  is  still  dotted  with  young  men  and  women, 
in  full  possession  of  their  minds,  faculties  and  vir- 
tue, who  feel  themselves  profoundly  alien  to  the 
work  which  is  going  on  around  them.  They  must 
not  be  confused  with  the  disloyal  or  the  pro-Ger- 
man. They  have  no  grudge  against  the  country, 
but  their  patriotism  has  broken  down  in  the  emer- 
gency. They  want  to  see  the  carnage  stopped  and 
Europe  decently  constructed  again.  They  want  a 
democratic  peace.  If  the  swift  crushing  of  Ger- 
many will  bring  that  peace,  they  want  to  see  Ger- 
many crushed.  If  the  embargo  on  neutrals  will 
[  102] 


prove  the  decisive  coup,  they  are  willing  to  see  the 
neutrals  taken  ruthlessly  by  the  throat.  But  they 
do  not  really  believe  that  peace  will  come  by  any 
of  these  .means,  or  by  any  use  of  our  war- technique 
whatever.  They  are  genuine  pragmatists  and 
they  fear  any  kind  of  an  absolute,  even  when  bear- 
ing gifts.  They  know  that  the  longer  a  war  lasts 
the  harder  it  is  to  make  peace.  They  know  that 
the  peace  of  exhaustion  is  a  dastardly  peace,  leav-s 
ing  enfeebled  the  morale  of  the  defeated,  and  leav- 
ing invincible  for  years  all  the  most  greedy  and 
soulless  elements  in  the  conquerors.  They  feel 
that  the  greatest  obstacle  to  peace  now  is  the  lack 
of  the  powerful  mediating  neutral  which  we  might 
have  been.  They  see  that  war  has  lost  for  us  both 
the  mediation  and  the  leadership,  and  is  blacken- 
ing us  ever  deeper  with  the  responsibility  for  hav- 
ing prolonged  the  dreadful  tangle.  They  are 
skeptical  not  only  of  the  technique  of  war,  but  also 
of  its  professed  aims.  The  President's  idealism 
stops  just  short  of  the  pitch  that  would  arouse  their 
own.  There  is  a  middle-aged  and  belated  taint 
about  the  best  ideals  which  publicist  liberalism  has 
been  able  to  express.  The  appeals  to  propagate 

[  103] 


political  democracy  leave  these  people  cold  in  a 
world  which  has  become  so  disillusioned  of  democ- 
racy in  the  face  of  universal  economic  servitude. 
Their  ideals  outshoot  the  government's.  To  them 
the  real  arena  lies  in  the  international  class-strug- 
gle, rather  than  in  the  competition  of  artificial  na- 
tional units.  They  are  watching  to  see  what  the 
Russian  socialists  are  going  to  do  for  the  world, 
not  what  the  timorous  capitalistic  American  de- 
mocracy may  be  planning.  They  can  feel  no  en- 
thusiasm for  a  League  of  Nations,  which  should 
solidify  the  old  units  and  continue  in  disguise  the 
old  theories  of  international  relations.  Indispens- 
able, perhaps*?  But  not  inspiring;  not  something 
to'  give  one's  spiritual  allegiance  to.  And  yet  the 
best  advice  that  American  wisdom  can  offer  to 
those  who  are  out  of  sympathy  with  the  war  is  to 
turn  one's  influence  toward  securing  that  our  war 
contribute  toward  this  end.  But  why  would  not 
this  League  turn  out  to  be  little  more  than  a  well- 
oiled  machine  for  the  use  of  that  enlightened  im- 
perialism toward  which  liberal  American  finance 
is  already  whetting  its  tongue1?  And  what  is  en- 
lightened imperialism  as  an  international  ideal  as 
[  104] 


against  the  anarchistic  communism  of  the  nations 
which  the  new  Russia  suggests  in  renouncing  im- 
perialist intentions? 

.  vi 

Skeptical  of  the  means  and  skeptical  of  the 
aims,  this  element  of  .the  younger  generation  stands 
outside  the  war,  and  looks  upon  the  conscript  army 
and  all  the  other  war-activities  as  troublesome  in- 
terruptions on  its  'thought  and  idealism,  interrup- 
tions which  do  not  touch  anywhere  a  fiber  of  its 
soul.  Some  have  been  much  more  disturbed  than 
others,  because  of  the  determined  challenge  of  both 
patriots  and  realists  to  break  in  with  the  war- 
obsession  which  has  filled  for  them  their  sky.  Pa- 
triots and  realists  can  both  be  answered.  They 
must  not  be  allowed  to  shake  one's  inflexible  de- 
termination not  to  be  spiritually  implicated  in  the 
war.  It  is  foolish  to  hope.  Since  the  3Oth  of 
July,  1914,  nothing  has  happened  in  the  arena  of 
war-policy  and  war- technique  except  for  the  com- 
plete and  unmitigated  worst.  We  are  tired  of 
continued  disillusionment,  and  of  the  betrayal  of 
generous  anticipations.  It  is  saner  not  to  waste 

[105] 


energy  in  hope  within  the  system  of  war-enterprise. 
One  may  accept  dispassionately  whatever  changes 
for  good  may  happen  from  the  war,  but  one  will 
not  allow  one's  imagination  to  connect  them  or- 
ganically with  war.  It  is  better  to  itsist  cheap 
consolations,  and  remain  skeptical  about  any  of 
the  good  things  so  confidently  promised  us  either 
through  victory  or  the  social  reorganization  de- 
manded by  the  war-technique.  One  keeps  healthy 
in  wartime  not  by  a  series  of  religious  and  political 
consolations  that  something  good  is  coming  out  of 
it  all,  but  by  a  vigorous  assertion  of  values  in 
which  war  has  no  part.  Our  skepticism  can  be 
made  a  shelter  behind  which  is  built  up  a  wider 
consciousness  of  the  personal  and  social  and  artis- 
tic ideals  which  American  civilization  needs  to 
lead  the  good  life.  We  can  be  skeptical  construc- 
tively, if,  thrown  back  on  our  inner  resources  from 
the  world  of  war  which  is  taken  as  the  overmaster- 
ing reality,  we  search  much  more  actively  to  clar- 
ify our  attitudes  and  express  a  richer  significance 
in  the  American  scene.  We  do  not  feel  the  war 
to  be  very  real,  and  we  sense  a  singular  air  of 
falsity  about  the  emotions  of  the  upper-classes  to- 

[106] 


ward  everything  connected  with  war.  This  os- 
tentatious shame,  this  groveling  before  illusory 
Allied  heroisms  and  nobilities,  has  shocked  us. 
Minor  novelists  and  minor  poets  and  minor  pub- 
licists are  still  coming  back  from  driving  ambu- 
lances in  France  to  write  books  that  nag  us  into  an 
appreciation  of  the  "real  meaning."  No  one  can 
object  to  the  generous  emotions  of  service  in  a 
great  cause  or  to  the  horror  and  pity  at  colossal 
devastation  and  agony.  But  too  many  of  these 
prophets  are  men  who  have  lived  rather  briskly' 
among  the  cruelties  and  thinnesses  of  American 
civilization  and  have  shown  no  obvious  horror  and 
pity  at  the  exploitations  and  the  arid  quality  of  the 
life  lived  here  around  us.  Their  moral  sense  had 
been  deeply  stirred  by  what  they  saw  in  France 
and  Belgium,  but  it  was  a  moral  sense  relatively 
unpracticed  by  deep  concern  and  reflection  over 
the  inadequacies  of  American  democracy.  Few  of 
them  had  used  their  vision  to  create  literature  im- 
pelling us  toward  a  more  radiant  American  future. 
And  that  is  why,  in  spite  of  their  vivid  stirrings, 
they  seem  so  unconvincing.  Their  idealism  is  too 
new  and  bright  to  affect  us,  for  it  comes  from  men 
[107] 


who  never  cared  very  particularly  about  great 
creative  American  ideas.  So  these  writers  come 
to  us  less  like  ardent  youth,  pouring  its  energy  into 
the  great  causes,  than  like  youthful  mouthpieces  of 
their  strident  and  belligerent  elders.  They  did 
not  convert  us,  but  rather  drove  us  farther  back 
into  the  Tightness  of  American  isolation. 

VII 

''There  was  something  incredibly  mean  and  ple- 
beian about  that  abasement  into  which  the  war- 
partisans  tried  to  throw  us  all.  When  we  were 
urged  to  squander  our  emotion  on  a  bedeviled 
Europe,  our  intuition  told  us  how  much  all  rich 
and  generous  emotions  were  needed  at  home  to 
leaven  American  civilization.  If  we  refused  to 
export  them  it  was  because  we  wanted  to  see  them 
at  work  here.  It  is  true  that  great  reaches  of 
American  prosperous  life  were  not  using  generous 
emotions  for  any  purpose  whatever.  But  the  real 
antithesis  was  not  between  being  concerned  about 
luxurious  automobiles  and  being  concerned  about 
the  saving  of  France.  America's  "benevolent 
neutrality"  had  been  saving  the  Allies  for  three 

[108] 


years  through  the  ordinary  channels  of  industry 
and  trade.  We  could  afford  to  export  material 
goods  and  credit  far  more  than  we  could  afford  to 
export  emotional  capital.  The  real  antithesis  was 
between  interest  in  expensively  exploiting  Amer- 
ican material  life  and  interest  in  creatively  enhanc- 
ing American  personal  and  artistic  life.  The  fat 
and  earthy  American  could  be  blamed  not  for  not 
palpitating  more  richly  about  France,  but  for  not 
palpitating  more  richly  about  America  and  her 
spiritual  drouths.  The  war  will  leave  the  country 
spiritually  impoverished,  because  of  the  draining 
away  of  sentiment  into  the  channels  of  war. 
Creative  and  constructive  enterprises  will  suffer 
not  only  through  the  appalling  waste  of  financial 
capital  in  the  work  of  annihilation,  but  also  in  the 
loss  of  emotional  capital  in  the  conviction  that  war 
overshadows  all  other  realities.  This  is  the  poison 
of  war  that  disturbs  even  creative  minds.  Writ- 
ers tell  us  that,  after  contact  with  the  war,  litera- 
ture seems  an  idle  pastime,  if  not  an  offense,  in  a 
world  of  great  deeds.  Perhaps  literature  that  can 
be  paled  by  war  will  not  be  missed.  We  may  feel 
vastly  relieved  at  our  salvation  from  so  many 
[109] 


feeble  novels  and  graceful  verses  that  khaki-clad 
authors  might  have  given  us.  But  this  nobly- 
sounding  sense  of  the  futility  of  art  in  a  world 
of  war  may  easily  infect  conscientious  minds. 
And  it  is  against  this  infection  that  we  must  fight. 

VIII 

The  conservation  of  American  promise  is  the 
present  task  for  this  generation  of  malcontents  and 
aloof  men  and  women.  If  America  has  lost  its 

.  political  isolation,  it  is  all  the  more  obligated  to  re- 
tain its  spiritual  integrity.  This  does  not  mean 

< 

any  smug  retreat  from  the  world,  with  a  belief 
that  the  truth  is  in  us  and  can  only  be  contam- 
inated by  contact.  It  means  that  the  promise  of 
American  life  is  not  yet  achieved,  perhaps  not  even 
seen,  and  that,  until  it  is,  there  is  nothing  for  us 
but  stern  and  intensive  cultivation  of  our  garden. 
Our  insulation  will  not  be  against  any  great  crea- 
tive ideas  or  forms  that  Europe  brings.  It  will  be 
a  turning  within  in  order  that  we  may  have  some- 
thing to  give  without.  The  old  American  ideas 
which  are  still  expected  to  bring  life  to  the  world 
seem  stale  and  archaic.  It  is  grotesque  to  try  to 
[no] 


carry  democracy  to  Russia.  It  is  absurd  to  try  to 
contribute  to  the  world's  store  of  great  moving 
ideas  until  we  have  a  culture  to  give.  It  is  ab- 
surd for  us  to  think  of  ourselves  as  blessing  the 
world  with  anything  unless  we  hold  it  much  more 
self-consciously  and  significantly  than  we  hold 
anything  now.  Mere  negative  freedom  will  not 
do  as  a  twentieth-century  principle.  American 
ideas  must  be  dynamic  or  we  are  presumptuous  in 
offering  them  to  the  world. 

IX 

The  war — or  American  promise:  one  must  , 
choose.  One  cannot  be  interested  in  both.  For 
the  effect  of  the  war  will  be  to  impoverish  Ameri- 
can promise.  It  cannot  advance  it,  however  lib- 
erals may  choose  to  identify  American  promise 
with  a  league  of  nations  to  enforce  peace.  Amer- 
icans who  desire  to  cultivate  the  promises  of  Amer- 
ican life  need  not  lift  a  finger  to  obstruct  the  war, 
but  they  cannot  conscientiously  accept  it.  How- 
ever intimately  a  part  of  their  country  they  may 
feel  in  its  creative  enterprises  toward  a  better  life,, 
they  cannot  feel  themselves  a  part  of  it  in  its  fu* 


tile  and  self-mutilating  enterprise  of  war.  We 
can  be  apathetic  with  a  good  conscience,  for  we 
have  other  values  and  ideals  for  America.  Our 
country  will  not  suffer  for  our  lack  of  patriotism 
as  long  as  it  has  that  of  our  industrial  masters. 
Meanwhile,  those  who  have  turned  their  thinking 
into  war-channels  have  abdicated  their  leadership 
for  this  younger  generation.  They  have  put 
themselves  in  a  limbo  of  interests  that  are  not  the 
concerns  which  worry  us  about  American  life  and 
make  us  feverish  and  discontented. 

Let  us  compel  the  war  to  break  in  on  us,  if  it 
must,  not  go  hospitably  to  meet  it.  Let  us  force 
it  perceptibly  to  batter  in  our  spiritual  walls. 
This  attitude  need  not  be  a  fatuous  hiding  in  the 
sand,  denying  realities.  When  we  are  broken  in 
on,  we  can  yield  to  the  inexorable.  Those  who 
are  conscripted  will  have  been  broken  in  on.  If 
they  do  not  want  to  be  martyrs,  they  will  have  to 
be  victims.  They  are  entitled  to  whatever  allevi- 
ations are  possible  in  an  inexorable  world.  But 
the  others  can  certainly  resist  the  attitude  that 
blackens  the  whole  conscious  sky  with  war.  They 
can.  resist  the  poison  which  makes  art  and  all  the 


desires  for  more  impassioned  living  seem  idle  and 
even  shameful.  For  many  of  us,  resentment 
against  the  war  has  meant  a  vivider  consciousness 
of  what  we  are  seeking  in  American  life. 

This  search  has  been  threatened  by  two  classes 
who  have  wanted  to  deflect  idealism  to  the  war, — 
the  patriots  and  the  realists.  The  patriots  have 
challenged  us  by  identifying  apathy  with  disloy- 
alty. The  reply  is  that  war-technique  in  this  sit- 
uation is  a  matter  of  national  mechanics  rather 
than  national  ardor.  The  realists  have  challenged 
us  by  insisting  that  the  war  is  an  instrument  in  the 
working-out  of  beneficent  national  policy.  Our 
skepticism  points  out  to  them  how  soon  their  "mas- 
tery" becomes  "drift,"  tangled  in  the  fatal  drive 
toward  victory  as  its  own  end,  how  soon  they  be- 
come mere  agents  and  expositors"  of  forces  as  they 
are.  Patriots  and  realists  disposed  of,  we  can  pur- 
sue creative  skepticism  with  honesty,  and  at  least  a 
hope  that  in  the  recoil  from  war  we  may  find  the 
treasures  we  are  looking  for. 


[113] 


VI 
TWILIGHT  OF  IDOLS 

(October,  1917) 

i 

WHERE  are  the  seeds  of  American  promise*? 
Man  cannot  live  by  politics  alone,  and  it  is  small 
cheer  that  our  best  intellects  are  caught  in  the  po- 
litical current  and  see  only  the  hope  that  America 
will  find  her  soul  in  the  remaking  of  the  world. 
If  William  James  were  alive  would  he  be  accept- 
ing the  war-situation  so  easily  and  complacently4? 
Would  he  be  chiding  the  over-stimulated  intelli- 
gence of  peace-loving  idealists,  and  excommuni- 
cating from  the  ranks  of  liberal  progress  the  piti- 
ful remnant  of  those  who  struggle  "above  the  bat- 
tle'"? I  like  to  think  that  his  gallant  spirit  would 
have  called  for  a  war  to  be  gallantly  played,  with 
insistent  care  for  democratic  values  at  home,  and 


unequivocal  alliance  with  democratic  elements 
abroad  for  a  peace  that  should  promise  more  than 
a  mere  union  of  benevolent  imperialisms.  I  think 
of  James  now  because  the  recent  articles  of  John 
Dewey's  on  the  war  suggest  a  slackening  in  his 
thought  for  our  guidance  and  stir,  and  -the  inade- 
quacy of  his  pragmatism  as  a  philosophy  of  life  in 
this  emergency.  Whether  James  would  have 
given  us  just  that  note  of  spiritual  adventure 
which  would  make  the  national  enterprise  seem 
creative  for  an  American  future, — this  we  can 
never  know.  But  surely  that  philosophy  of 
Dewey's  which  we  had  been  following  so  uncrit- 
ically for  so  long,  breaks  down  almost  noisily 
when  it  is  used  to  grind  out  interpretation  for  the 
present  crisis.  These  articles  on  "Conscience  and 
Compulsion,"  'The  Future  of  Pacifism,"  "What 
America  Will  Fight  For,"  "Conscription  of 
Thought,"  which  The  New  Republic  has  been 
printing,  seem  to  me  to  be  a  little  off-color.  A 
philosopher  who  senses  so  little  the  sinister  forces 
of  war,  who  is  so  much  more  concerned  over  the 
excesses  of  the  pacifists  than  over  the  excesses  of 
military  policy,  who  can  feel  only  amusement  at 


the  idea  that  any  one  should  try  to  conscript 
thought,  who  assumes  that  the  war-technique  can 
be  used  without  trailing  along  with  it  the  mob- 
fanaticisms,  the  injustices  and  hatreds,  that  are  or- 
ganically bound  up  with  it,  is  speaking  to  another 
element  of  the  younger  intelligentsia  than  that  to 
which  I  belong.  Evidently  the  attitudes  which 
war  calls  out  are  fiercer  and  more  incalculable  than 
Professor  E)ewey  is  accustomed  to  take  into  his 
hopeful  and  intelligent  imagination,  and  the  prag- 
matist  mind,  in  trying  to  adjust  itself  to  them, 
gives  the  air  of  grappling,  like  the  pioneer  who 
challenges  the  arid  plains,  with  a  power  too  big 
for  it.  It  is  not  an  arena  of  creative  intelligence 
our  country's  mind  is  now,  but  of  mob-psychology. 
The  soldiers  who  tried  to  lynch  Max  Eastman 
showed  that  current  patriotism  is  not  a  product  of 
the  will  to  remake  the  world.  The  luxuriant  re- 
leases of  explosive  hatred  for  which  peace  ap- 
parently gives  far  too  little  scope  cannot  be  wooed 
by  sweet  reasonableness,  nor  can  they  be  the  raw 
material  for  the  creation  of  rare  liberal  political 
structures.  All  that  can  be  done  is  to  try  to  keep 
your  country  out  of  situations  where  such  expres- 


sive  releases  occur.  If  you  have  willed  the  situa- 
tion, however,  or  accepted  it  as  inevitable,  it  is 
fatuous  to  protest  against  the  gay  debauch  of  ha- 
tred and  fear  and  swagger  that  must  mount  and 
mount,  until  the  heady  and  virulent  poison  of 
war  shall  have  created  its  own  anti-toxin  of  ruin 
and  disillusionment.  To  talk  as  if  war  were  any- 
thing else  than  such  a  poison  is  to  show  that  your 
philosophy  has  never  been  confronted  with  the 
pathless  and  the  inexorable,  and  that,  only  dimly 
feeling  the  change,  it  goes  ahead  acting  as  if  it 
had  not  got  out  of  its  depth.  Only  a  lack  of 
practice  with  a  world  of  human  nature  so  raw- 
nerved,  irrational,  uncreative,  as  an  America  at  . 
war  was  bound  to  show  itself  to  be,  can  account 
for  the  singular  unsatisfactoriness  of  these  later  ut- 
terances of  Dewey.  He  did  have  one  moment  of 
hesitation  just  before  the  war  began,  when  the  war 
and  its  external  purposes  and  unifying  power 
seemed  the  small  thing  beside  that  internal  ad- 
venture which  should  find  our  American  promise.  ' 
But  that  perspective  has  now  disappeared,  and  <ffie 
finds  Dewey  now  untainted  by  skepticism  as  to  our 
being  about  a  business  to  which  all  our  idealism 


should  rally.  That  failure  to  get  guaranties  that 
this  country's  effort  would  obligate  the  Allies  to  a 
democratic  world-order  Dewey  blames  on  the  de- 
fection of  'the  pacifists,  and  then  somehow  man- 
ages to  get  himself  into  a  "we"  who  "romanti- 
cally," as  he  says,  forewent  this  crucial  link  of  our 
strategy.  Does  this  easy  identification  of  himself 
with  undemocratically  controlled  foreign  policy 
mean  that  a  country  is  democratic  when  it  accepts 
what  its  government  does,  or  that  war  has  a  nar- 
cotic effect  on  the  pragmatic  mind"?  For  Dewey 
somehow  retains  his  sense  of  being  in  the  control- 
ling class,  and  ignores  those  anxious  questions  of 
democrats  who  have  been  his  disciples  but  are  now 
resenters  of  the  war.  ,  . 

What  I  come  to  is  a  sense  of  suddenly  being  left 
in  the  lurch,  of  suddenly  finding  that  a  philosophy 
upon  which  I  had  relied  to  carry  us  through  no 
longer  works.  I  find  the  contrast  between  the 
idea  that  creative  intelligence  has  free  functioning 
in  wartime,  and  the  facts  of  the  inexorable  situa- 
tion, too  glaring.  The  contrast  between  what  lib- 
erals ought  to  be  doing  and  saying  if  democratic 
values  are  to  be  conserved,  and  what  the  real  forces 

[us] 


are  imposing  upon  them,  strikes  too  sternly  on  my 
intellectual  senses.  I  should  prefer  some  philos- 
ophy of  War  as  the  grim  and  terrible  cleanser  to 
this  optimism-haunted  mood  that  continues  un- 
weariedly  to  suggest  that  all  can  yet  be  made  to 
work  for  good  in  a  mad  and  half-destroyed  world. 
I  wonder  if  James,  in  the  face  of  such  disaster, 
would  not  have  abandoned  his  "moral  equivalent 
of  war"  for  an  "immoral  equivalent"  which,  in 
swift  and  periodic  saturnalia,  would  have  acted  as 
vaccination  aginst  the  sure  pestilence  of  war. 

ii 

Dewey's  philosophy  is  inspiring  enough  for  a 
society  at  peace,  prosperous  and  with  a  fund  of 
progressive  good-will.  It  is  a  philosophy  of  hope, 
of  clear-sighted  comprehension  of  materials  and 
means.  Where  institutions  are  at  all  malleable, 
it  is  the  only  clew  for  improvement.  It  is  scien- 
tific method  applied  to  "uplift."  But  this  care- 
ful adaptation  of  means  to  desired  ends,  this  ex- 
perimental working  out  of  control  over  brute 
forces  and  dead  matter  in  the  interests  of  com- 
munal life,  depends  on  a  store  of  rationality,  and  is 

[119] 


effectiye  only  where  there  is  strong  desire  for 
progress.  It  is  precisely  the  school,  the  institu- 
tion to  which  Dewey's  philosophy  was  first  ap- 
plied, that  is  of  all  our  institutions  the  most  mal- 
leable. And  it  is  the  will  to  educate  that  has 
seemed,  in  these  days,  among  all  our  social  atti- 
tudes the  most  rationally  motivated.  It  was  edu- 
cation, and  almost  education  alone,  that  seemed 
susceptible  to  the  steady  pressure  of  an  "instru- 
mental" philosophy.  Intelligence  really  seemed 
about  to  come  into  conscious  control  of  an  institu- 
tion, and  that  one  the  most  potent  in  molding  the 
attitudes  needed  for  a  civilized  society  and  the  ap- 
titudes needed  for  the  happiness  of  the  individual. 
For  both  our  revolutionary  conceptions  of  what 
education  means,  and  for  the  intellectual  strategy 
of  its  approach,  this  country  is  immeasurably  in- 
debted to  the  influence  of  Professor  Dewey's  phi- 
losophy. With  these  ideas  sincerely  felt,  a  ra- 
tional nation  would  have  chosen  education  as  its 

9 

national  enterprise.  Into  this  it  would  have 
thrown  its  energy  though  the  heavens  fell  and  the 
earth  rocked  around  it.  But  the  nation  did  not 
use  its  isolation  from  the  conflict  to  educate  itself. 
[120] 


It  fretted  for  three  years  and  then  let  war,  not  edu- 
cation, be  chosen,  at  the  almost  unanimous  behest 
of  our  intellectual  class,  from  motives  alien  to 
our  cultural  needs,  and  for  political  ends  alien  to 
the  happiness  of  the  individual.  But  nations,  of 
course,  are  not  rational  entities,  and  they  act 
within  their  most  irrational  rights  when  they  ac- 
cept war  as  the  most  important  thing  the  nation 
can  do  in  the  face  of  metaphysical  menaces  of  im- 
perial prestige.  What  concerns  us  here  is  the  rel- 
ative ease  with  which  the  pragmatist  intellectuals,' 
with  Professor  Dewey  at  the  head,  have  moved  out 
their  philosophy,  bag  and  baggage,  from  education 
to  war.  So  abrupt  a  change  in  the  direction  of" 
the  national  enterprise,  one  would  have  expected 
to  cause  more  emotion,  to  demand  more  apologet- 
ics. His  optimism  may  have  told  Professor 
Dewey  that  war  would  not  materially  demoralize 
our  growth — would,  perhaps,  after  all,  be  but  an 
incident  in  the  nation's  life — but  it  is  not  easy  to 
see  how,  as  we  skate  toward  the  bankruptcy  of 
war-billions,  there  will  be  resources  available  for 
educational  enterprise  that  does  not  contribute  di- 
rectly to  the  war-technique.  Neither  is  any  pas- 


sion  for  growth,  for  creative  mastery,  going  to 
flourish  among  the  host  of  militaristic  values  and 
new  tastes  for  power  that  are  springing  up  like 
poisonous  mushrooms  on  every  hand. 

How  could  the  pragmatist  mind  accept  war 
without  more  violent  protest,  without  a  greater 
wrench*?  Either  Professor  Dewey  and  his  friends 
felt  that  the  forces  were  too  strong  for  them,  that 
the  war  had  to  be,  and  it  was  better  to  take  it  up 
intelligently  than  to  drift  blindly  in;  or  else  they 
really  expected  a  gallant  war,  conducted  with 
jealous  regard  for  democratic  values  at  home  and 
a  captivating  vision  of  international  democracy 
as  the  end  of  all  the  toil  and  pain.  If  their  mo- 
tive was  the  first,  they  would  seem  to  have  reduced 
the  scope  of  possible  control  of  events  to  the  van- 
ishing point.  If  the  war  is  too  strong  for  you  to 
prevent,  how  is  it  going  to  be  weak  enough  for  you 
to  control  and  mold  to  your  liberal  purposes'? 
And  if  their  motive  was  to  shape  the  war  firmly 
for  good,  they  seem  to  have  seriously  miscalculated 
the  fierce  urgencies  of  it.  Are  they  to  be  content, 
as  the  materialization  of  their  hopes,  with  a  doubt- 
ful League  of  Nations  and  the  suppression  of  the 
[122] 


I.  W.  W.*?  Yet  the  numbing  power  of  the  war-' 
situation  seems  to  have  kept  them  from  realizing 
what  has  happened  to  their  philosophy.  The  be- 
trayal of  their  first  hopes  has  certainly  not  dis- 
couraged them.  But  neither  has  it  roused  them  to 
a  more  energetic  expression  of  the  forces  through 
which  they  intend  to  realize  them.  I  search  Pjo- . 
fessor  Dewey's  articles  in  vain  for  clews  as  to  the 
specific  working-out  of  our  democratic  desires, 
either  nationally  or  internationally,  either  in  the 
present  or  in  the  reconstruction  after  the  war.  No 
programme  is  suggested,  nor  is  there  fueling  for 
present  vague  popular  movements  and  revolts. 
Rather  are  the  latter  chided,  for  their  own  vague- 
ness and  impracticalities.  Similarly,  with  the 
other  prophets  of  instrumentalism  who  accompany 
Dewey  into  the  war,  democracy  remains  an  unan- 
alyzed  term,  useful  as  a  c*all  to  battle,  but  not  an 
intellectual  tool,  turning  up  fresh  sod  for  the 
changing  future.  Is  it  the  political  democracy  of 
a  plutocratic  America  that  we  are  fighting  for,  or 
is  it  the  social  democracy  of  the  new  Russia"? 
Which  do  our  rulers  really  fear  more,  the  menace 
of  Imperial  Germany,  or  the  liberating  influence 
[123] 


of  a  socialist  Russia.  In  the  application  of  their 
philosophy  to  politics,  our  pragmatists  are  slid- 
ing over  this  crucial  question  of  ends.  Dewey 
says  our  ends  must  be  intelligently  international 
rather  than  chauvinistic.  But  this  gets  us  little 
distance  along  our  way. 

In  this  difficult  time  the  light  that  has  been  in 
liberals  and  radicals  has  become  darkness.  If 
radicals  spend  their  time  holding  conventions  to 
attest  their  loyalty  and  stamp  out  the  "enemies 
within,"  they  do  not  spend  it  in  breaking  intellec- 
tual paths,  or  giving  us  shining  ideas  to  which  we 
can  attach  our  faith  and  conscience.  The  spir- 
itual apathy  from  which  the  more  naive  of  us  suf- 
fer, and  which  the  others  are  so  busy  fighting, 
arises  largely  from  sheer  default  of  a  clear  vision 
that  would  melt  it  away.  Let  the  motley  crew 
of  'ex-socialists,  and  labor  radicals,  and  liberals 
and  pragmatist  philosophers,  who  have  united  for 
the  prosecution  of  the  war,  present  a  coherent  and 
convincing  democratic  programme,  and  they  will 
no  longer  be  confronted  with  the  skepticism  of  the 
^conscientious  and  the  impossibilist.  But  when 
the  emphasis  is  on  technical  organization,  rather 


than  organization  of  ideas,  on  strategy  rather  than 
desires,  one  begins  to  suspect  that  no  programme 
is  presented  because  they  have  none  to  present. 
This  burrowing  into  war-technique  hides  the  void 
where  a  democratic  philosophy  should  be.  Our 
intellectuals  consort  with  war-boards  in  order  to 
keep  their  minds  off  the  question  what  the  slow 
masses  of  the  people  are  really  desiring,  or  toward- 
what  the  best  hope  of  the  country  really  drives. 
Similarly  the  blaze  of  patriotism  on  the  part  of 
the  radicals  serves  the  purpose  of  concealing  the 
feebleness  of  their  intellectual  light. 

Is  the  answer  that  clear  formulation  of  demo- 
cratic ends  must  be  postponed  until  victory  in  the 
war  is  attained?     But  to  make  this  answer  is  to' 
surrender  the  entire  case.     For  the  support  of  the 
war  by  radicals,  realists,  pragmatists,  is  due — or 
so  they  say — to  the  fact  that  the  war  is  not  dnly 
saving  the  cause  of  democracy,  but  is  immensely "" 
accelerating  its  progress.     Well,  what  are  those* 
gains'?     How  are  they  to  be  conserved*?     What 
do  they  lead  to*?     How  can  we  further  them? 
Into  what  large  idea  of  society  do  they  group? 
To  ignore  these  questions,  and  think  only  of  the 


war-technique  and  its  accompanying  devotions,  is 
to  undermine  the  foundations  of  these  people's 
own  faith. 

-  A  policy  of  "win  the  war  first"  must  be,  for  the 
radical,  a  policy  of  intellectual  suicide.  Their 
.  support  of  the  war  throws  upon  them  the  responsi- 
bility of  showing  inch  by  inch  the  democratic 
gains,  and  of  laying  out  a  charter  of  specific  hopes. 
Otherwise  they  confess  that  they  are  impotent  and 
th,at  the  war  is  submerging  their  expectations,  or 
that  they  are  not  genuinely  imaginative  and  offer 
little  promise  for  future  leadership. 

in 

,  It  may  seem  unfair  to  group  Professor  Dewey 
'  with  Mr.  Spargo  and  Mr.  Gompers,  Mr.  A.  M. 
Simons,  and  the  Vigilantes.  I  do  so  only  because 
in  their  acceptance  of  the  war,  they  are  all  living 
out  that  popular  American  "instrumental"  philos- 
ophy which  Professor  Dewey  has  formulated  in 
such  convincing  and  fascinating  terms.  On  an  in- 
finitely more  intelligent  plane,  he  is  yet  one  with 
them  in  his  confidence  that  the  war  is  motivated 
by  democratic  ends  and  is  being  made  to  serve 

['126] 


them.  A  high  mood  of  confidence  and  self-right- 
eousness moves  them  all,  a  keen  sense  of  control 
over  events  that  makes  them  eligible  to  disciple- 
ship  under  Professor  Dewey's  philosophy.  They 
are  all  hostile  to  impossibilism,  to  apathy,  to  any 
attitude  that  is  not  a  cheerful  and  brisk  setting 
to  work  to  use  the  emergency  to  consolidate  the 
gains  of  democracy.  Not,  Is  it  being  used"?  but, 
Let  us  make  a  flutter  about  using  it!  This  una- 
nimity of  mood  puts  the  resenter  of  war  out  of 
the  arena.  But  he  can  still  seek  to  explain  why 
this  philosophy  which  has  no  place  for  the  inexor- 
able should  have  adjusted  itself  so  easily  to  the 
inexorable  of  war,  and  why,  although  a  philos- 
ophy of  the  creative  intelligence  'in  using  means 
toward  ends,  it  should  show  itself  so  singularly 
impoverished  in  its  present  supply  of  democratic 
values. 

What  is  the  matter  with  the  philosophy?  One 
has  a  sense  of  having  come  to  a  sudden,  short  stop 
at  the  end  of  an  intellectual  era.  In  the  crisis, 
this  philosophy  of  intelligent  control  just  does 
not  measure  up  to  our  needs.  What  is  the  root 
of  this  inadequacy  that  is  felt  so  keenly  by  our 


restless  minds'?  Van  Wyck  Brooks  has  pointed 
out  searchingly  the  lack  of  poetic  vision  in  our 
pragmatist  "awakeners."  Is  there  something  in 
these  realistic  attitudes  that  works  actually  against 
poetic  vision,  against  concern  for  the  quality  of 
life  as  above  machinery  of  life?  Apparently 
there  is.  The  war  has  revealed  a  younger  intelli- 
gentsia, trained  up  in  the  pragmatic  dispensation, 
immensely  ready  for  the  executive  ordering  of 
events,  pitifully  unprepared  for  the  intellectual 
interpretation  of  the  idealistic  focusing  of  ends. 
The  young  men  in  Belgium,  the  officers'  training 
corps,  the  young  men  being  sucked  into  the  coun- 
cils at  Washington  and  into  war-organization 
everywhere,  have  among  them  a  definite  element, 
upon  whom  Dewey,  as  veteran  philosopher,  might 
well  bestow  a  papal  blessing.  They  have  ab- 
sorbed the  secret  of  scientific  method  as  applied  to 
political  administration.  They  are  liberal,  en- 
.  lightened,  aware.  They  are  touched  with  crea- 
tive intelligence  toward  the  solution  of  political 
and  industrial  problems.  They  are  a  wholly  new 
force  in  American  life,  the  product  of  the  swing 
in  the  colleges  from  a  training  that  emphasized 

[128] 


classical  studies  to  one  that  emphasized  political 
and  economic  values.  Practically  all  this  -  ele- 
ment, one  would  say,  is  lined  up  in  service  of  the 
war-technique.  There  seems  to  have  been  a  pe- 
culiar congeniality  between  the  war  and  these  men. 
It  is  as  if  the  war  and  they  had  been  waiting  for 
each  other.  One  wonders  what  scope  they  would 
have  had  for  their  intelligence  without  it.  Prob- 
ably most  of  them  would  have  gone  into  industry 
and  devoted  themselves  to  sane  reorganization 
schemes.  What  is  significant  is  that  it  is  the  tech- 
nical side  of  the  war  that  appeals  to  them,  not  the 
interpretative  or  political  side.  The  formulation 
of  values  and  ideals,  the  production  of  articulate 
and  suggestive  thinking,  had  not,  in  their  educa- 
tion, kept  pace,  to  any  extent  whatever,  with 
their  technical  aptitude.  The  result  is  that  the 
field  of  intellectual  formulation  is  very  poorly 
manned  by  this  younger  intelligentsia.  While 
they  organize  the  war,  formulation  of  ^opinion  is 
left  largely  in  the  hands  of  professional  patriots, 
sensational  editors,  archaic  radicals.  The  intel- 
lectual work  of  this  younger  intelligentsia  is  done 
by  the  sedition-hunting  Vigilantes,  and  by  the  sav 
[129] 


ing  remnant  of  older  liberals.  It  is  true,  Dewey 
calls  for  a  more  attentive  formulation  of  war- 
purposes  and  ideas,  but  he  calls  largely  to  deaf 
ears.  His  disciples  have  learned  all  too  literally 
the  instrumental  attitude  toward  life,  and,  being 
immensely  intelligent  and  energetic,  they  are  mak- 
ing themselves  efficient  instruments  of  the  war- 
technique,  accepting  with  little  question  the  ends 
as  announced  from  above.  That  those  ends  are 
largely  negative  does  not  concern  them,  because 
they  have  never  learned  not  to  subordinate  idea  to 
technique.  Their  education  has  not  given  them  a 
coherent  system  of  large  ideas,  or  a  feeling  for 
democratic  goals.  They  have,  in  short,  no  clear 
philosophy  of  life  except  that  of  intelligent  serv- 
ice, the  admirable  adaptation  of  means  to  ends. 
They  are  vague  as  to  what  kind  of  a  society  they 
.want,  or  what  kind  of  society  America  needs,  but 
they  are  equipped  with  all  the  administrative  atti- 
tudes and  talents  necessary  to  attain  it. 

To  those  of  us  who  have  taken  Dewey's  philos- 
ophy almost  as  our  American  religion,  it  never 
occurred   that  values  could  be  subordinated   to 
technique.     We  were  instrumentalists,  but  we  had 
[130] 


our  private  Utopias  so  clearly  before  our  mmds 
that  the  means  fell  always,  into  its  place  as  con- 
tributory. And  Dewey,  of  course7  always  meant 
his  philosophy,  when  taken  as  a  philosophy  of  life, 
to  start  with  values.  But  there  was  always  that 
unhappy  ambiguity  in  his  doctrine  as  to  just  how 
values  were  created,  and  it  became  easier  and  eas- 
ier to  assume  that  just  any  growth  was  justified 
and  almost  any  activity  valuable  so  long  as  if. 
achieved  ends.  The  American,  in  living  out  this 
philosophy,  has  habitually  confused  results  wi.th 
product,  and  been  content  with  getting  somewhere 
without  asking  too  closely  whether  it  was  the  de- 
sirable place  to  get.  It  is  now  becoming  plain 
that  unless  you  start  with  the  vividest  kind  of 
poetic  vision,  your  instrumentalism  is  likely  to 
land  you  just  where  it  has  landed  this  younger 
intelligentsia  which  is  so  happily  and  busily  en- 
gaged in  the  national  enterprise  of  war.  You 
must  have  your  vision  and  you  must  have  your 
technique.  The  practical  effect  of  Dewey's  phi- 
losophy has  evidently  been  to  develop  the  sense 
of  the  latter  at  the  expense '  of  the  formery 
Though  he  himself  would  develop  them  together, 

[131] 


even  in  him  there  seems  to  be  a  flagging  of  values, 
under  the  influence  of  war.     The  New  Republic 
honorably  'clamors  for  the  Allies  to  subordinate 
military  strategy  to  political  ends,  technique  to 
democratic  values.     But  war  always  undermines 
values.     It  is  the  outstanding  lesson  of  the  whole 
war  that  statesmen  cannot  be  trusted  to  get  this 
perspective  right,  that  their  only  motto  is,  first  to 
win  and  then  grab  what  they  can.     The  struggle 
against  this  statesmanlike  animus  must  be  a  losing 
one  as  long  as  we  have  not  very  clear  and  very  de- 
termined and  very  revolutionary  democratic  ideas 
and  programmes  to  challenge  them  with.     The 
trouble  with  our  situation  is  not  only  that  values 
have  been  generally  ignored  in  favor  of  technique, 
but  that  those  who  have  struggled  to  keep  values 
foremost,  have  been  too  bloodless  and  too  near- 
sighted in  their  vision.     The  defect  of  any  philos- 
ophy of  "adaptation"  or  "adjustment,"  even  when 
it  means  adjustment  to  changing,  living  experi- 
ence, is  that  there  is  no  provision  for  thought  or 
experience  getting  beyond  itself.     If  your  ideal  is 
to  be  adjustment  to  your  situation,  in  radiant  co- 
operation with  reality,  then  your  success  is  likely 
[132] 


to  be  just  that  and  no  more.  You  never  transcend, 
anything.  You  grow,  but  your  spirit  never  jumps 
out  of  your  skin  to  go  on  wild  adventures.  If 
your  policy  as  a  publicist  reformer  is  to  t'ake 
what  you  can  get,  you  are  likely  to  find  that  you 
get  something  less  than  you  should  be  willing  to 
take.  Italy  in  the  settlement  is  said  to  be  de- 
manding one  hundred  in  order  to  get  twenty,  and 
this  Machiavellian  principle  might  well  be  adopted 
by  the  radical.  Vision  must  constantly  outshoot 
technique,  opportunist  efforts  usually  achieve  less 
even  than  what  seemed  obviously  possible.  An 
impos'sibilist  elan  that  appeals  to  desire  will  often 
carry  further.  A  philosophy  of  adjustment  will 
not  even  make  for  adjustment.  If  you  try  merely 
to  "meet"  situations  as  they  come,  you  will  not 
even  meet  them.  Instead  you  will  only  pile  up 
behind  you  deficits  and  arrears  that  will  some  day 
bankrupt  you. 

We  are  in  the  war  because  an  American  Govern- 
ment practiced  a  philosophy  of  adjustment,  and 
an  instrumentalism  for  minor  ends,  instead  of  cje- 
ating  new  values  and  setting  at  once  a  large  stand- 
ard to  which  the  nations  might  repair.  An  intel- 
[133] 


lectual  attitude  of  mere  adjustment,  of  mere  use 
of  the  creative  intelligence  to  make  your  progress, 
must  end  in  caution,  regression,  and  a  virtual  fail- 
ure to  effect  even  that  change  which  you  so  clear- 
sightedly and  desirously  see.  This  is  the  root  of 
our  dissatisfaction  with  much  of  the  current  po- 
litical and  social  realism  that  is  preached  to  us. 
'  It  has  everything  good  and  wise  except  the  obstrep- 
erous vision  that  would  drive  and  draw  all  men 
into  it. 

IV 

The  working-out  of  this  American  philosophy 
in  our  intellectual  life  then  has  meant  an  exag- 
gerated emphasis  on  the  mechanics  of  life  at  the 
expense  of  the  quality  of  living.  We  suffer  from 
a  real  shortage  of  spiritual  values.  A  philosophy 
that  worked  when  we  were  trying  to  get  that  ma- 
terial foundation  for  American  life  in  which  more 
impassioned  living  could  flourish  no  longer  works 
when  we  are  faced  with  inexorable  disaster  and  the 
hysterias  of  the  mob.  The  note  of  complacency 
which  we  detect  in  the  current  expressions  of  this 
philosophy  has  "a  bad  taste.  The  congruous  note 
for  the  situation  would  seem,  to  be,  on  the  con- 

[134] 


trary,  that  of  robust  desperation, — a  desperation 
that  shall  rage  and  struggle  until  new  values  come 
out  of  the  travail,  and  we  see  some  glimmering 
of  our  democratic  way.  In  the  creation  of  these 
new  values,  we  may  expect  the  old  philosophy,  the 
old  radicalism,  to  be  helpless.  It  has  found  a 
perfectly  definite  level,  and  there  is  no  reason  to 
think  that  it  will  not  remain  there.  Its  flowering 
appears  in  the  technical  organization  of  the  war 
by  an  earnest  group  of  young  liberals,  who  direct 
their  course  by  an  opportunist  programme  of  State- 
socialism  at  home  and  a  league  of  benevolently 
imperialistic  nations  abroad.  At  their  best  they 
can  give  us  a  government  by  prudent,  enlightened 
college  men  instead  of  by  politicians.  At  their 
best,  they  can  abolish  war  by  making  everybody  a 
partner  in  the  booty  of  exploitation.  That  is  all, 
and  it  is  technically  admirable.  Only  there  is 
nothing  in  the  outlook  that  touches  in  any  way 
the  happiness  of  the  individual,  the  vivifying  of 
the  personality,  the  comprehension  of  social  forces, 
the  flair  of  art, — in  other  words,  the  quality  of 
life.  Our  intellectuals  have  failed  us  as  value- 
creators,  even  as  value-emphasizers.  The  allure 

[135] 


of  the  martial  in  war  has  passed  only  to  be  suc- 
ceeded by  the  allure  of  the  technical.  The  allure 
of  fresh  and  true  ideas,  of  free  speculation,  of  ar- 
tistic vigor,  of  cultural  styles,  of  intelligence  suf- 
fused by  feeling,  and  feeling  given  fiber  and  out- 
line by  intelligence,  has  not  come,  and  can  hardly 
come,  we  see  now,  while  our  reigning  philosophy 
is  an  instrumental  one. 

Whence  can  come  this  allure*?  Only  from 
those  who  are  thorough  malcontents.  Irritation 
at  things  as  they  are,  disgust  at  the  continual  frus- 
trations and  aridities  of  American  life,  deep  dis- 
satisfaction with  self  and  with  the  groups  that 
give  themselves  forth  as  hopeful, — out  of  such 
moods  there  might  be  hammered  new  values. 
The  malcontents  would  be  men  and  women  who 
could  not  stomach  the  war,  or  the  reactionary 
idealism  that  has  followed  in  its  train.  They  are 
quite  through  with  the  professional  critics  and 
classicists  who  have  let  cultural  values  die  through 
their  own  personal  ineptitude.  Yet  these  malcon- 
tents have  no  intention  of  being  cultural  vandals, 
only  to  slay.  They  are  not  barbarians,  but  seek 
the  vital  and  the  sincere  everywhere.  All  they 


want  is  a  new  orientation  of  the  spirit  that  shall 
be  modern,  an  orientation  to  accompany  that 
technical  orientation  which  is  fast  coming,  and 
which  the  war  accelerates.  They  will  be  harsh 
and  often  bad-tempered,  and  they  will  feel  that 
the  break-up  of  things  is  no  time  for  mellowness. 
They  will  have  a  taste  for  spiritual  adventure,  and 
for  sinister  imaginative  excursions.  It  will  not  be 
Puritanism  so  much  as  complacency  that  they  will 
fight.  'A  tang,  a  bitterness,  an  intellectual  fiber, 
a  verve,  "they  will  look  for  in  literature,  and  their 
most  virulent  enemies  will  be  those  unaccountable 
radicals  who  are  still  morally  servile,  and  are  now 
trying  to  suppress  all  free  speculation  in  the  in- 
terests of  nationalism.  Something  more  mocking, 
more  irreverent,  they  will  constantly  want.  They 
will  take  institutions  very  lightly,  indeed  will 
never  fail  to  be  surprised  at  the  seriousness  with 
which  good  radicals  take  the  stated  offices  and  sys- 
tems. Their  own  contempt  will  be  scarcely 
veiled,  and  they  will  be  glad  if  they  can  tease,  pro- 
voke, irritate  thought  on  any  subject.  These  mal- 
contents will  be  more  or  less  of  the  American  tribe 
of  talent  who  used  either  to  go  immediately  to 

[137] 


Europe,  or  starved  submissively  at  home.  But 
these  people  will  neither  go  to  Europe,  nor  starve 
submissively.  They  are  too  much  entangled 
emotionally  in  the  possibilities  of  American  life 
to  leave  it,  and  they  have  no  desire  whatever  to 
starve.  So  they  are  likely  to  go  ahead  beating 
their  heads  at  the  wall  until  they  are  either  bloody 
or  light  appears.  They  will  give  offense  to  their 
elders  who  cannot  see  what  all  the  concern  'is 
about,  and  they  will  hurt  the  more  middle-aged 
sense  of  adventure  upon  which  the  better  in- 
tegrated minds  of  the  younger  generation  will 
have  compromised.  Optimism  is  often  compen- 
satory, and  the  optimistic  mood  in  American 
thought  may  mean  merely  that  American  life  is 
too  terrible  to  face.  A  more  skeptical,  malicious, 
desperate,  ironical  mood  may  actually  be  the  sign 
of  more  vivid  and  more  stirring  life  fermenting 
in  America  to-day.  It  may  be  a  sign  of  hope. 
That  thirst  for  more  of  the  intellectual  "war  and 
laughter"  that  we  find  Nietzsche  calling  us  to 
may  bring  us  satisfactions  that  optimism-haunted 
philosophies  could  never  bring.  Malcontented- 
ness  may  be  the  beginning  of  promise.  That  is 

[138] 


why  I  evoked  the  spirit  of  William  James,  with 
its  gay  passion  for  ideas,  and  its  freedom  of 
speculation,  when  I  felt  the  slightly  pedestrian 
gait  into  which  the  war  had  brought  pragmatism. 
It  is  the  creative  desire  more  than  the  creative  in- 
telligence that  we  shall  need  if  we  are  ever  to  fly. 


[139] 


VII 

UNFINISHED  FRAGMENT  ON  THE 
STATE 

(Winter,  1918) 

GOVERNMENT  is  synonymous  with  neither 
State  nor  Nation.  It  is  the  machinery  by  which 
the  nation,  organized  as  a  State,  carries  out  its 
State  functions.  Government  is  a  framework  of 
the  administration  of  laws,  and  the  carrying  out 
of  the  public  force.  Government  is  the  idea  of 

•          *    *  * 

the  State  put  into  practical  operation  in  the  hands 

of   definite,    concrete,    fallible   men.     It    is    the 

^  visible  sign  of  the  invisible  grace.     It  is  the  word 

made  flesh.     And  it  has  necessarily  the  limitations 

-•> 
inherent  in  all  practicality.     Government  is  the 

only  form  in  which  we  can  envisage  the  State,  but 

it  is  by  no  means  identical  with  it.     That  the 

State  is  a  mystical  conception  is  something  that 

[140] 


must  never  be  forgotten.  Its  glamor  and  its  sig- 
nificance linger  behind  the  framework  of  Gov- 
ernment and  direct  its  activities. 

Wartime  brings  the  ideal  of  the  State  out  into 
very  clear  relief,  and  reveals  attitudes  and  ten- 
dencies that  were  hidden.  In  times  of  peace  the 
sense  of  the  State  flags  in  a  republic  that  is  not 
militarized.  For  war  is  essentially  the  health  of 
the  State.  The  ideal  of  the  State  is  that  within  ' 
its  territory  its  power  and  influence  should  be 
universal.  As  the  Church  is  the  medium  for  the 
spiritual  salvation  of  men,  so  the  State  is  thought 
of  as  the  medium  for  his  political  salvation.  Its- 
idealism  is t a  rich  blood  flowing  to'all'the  mem- 
bers of  the  body  politic.  And  it  is  precisely  in 
war  that  the  urgency  for  union  se,ems  greatest,  and 
the  necessity  for  universality  seems  most  unques- 
tioned. The  State  is  the  organization  of  the 
herd  to  act  offensively  or  defensively  against  an- 
other herd  similarly  organized.  The  more  terri- 
fying the  occasion  for  defense,  the  closer  will  be- 
come the  organization  and  the  more  coercive  the 
influence  upon  each  member  of  the  herd.  War 
sends  the  current  of  purpose  and  activity  flowing 

[HI] 


*  t-vv*1 

•«s^ 

^ 


A)Ldown  to  the  lowest  level  of  the  herd,  and  to  its 
most  remote  branches.  All  the  activities  of  so- 
ciety are  linked  together  as  fast  as  possible  to  this 
central  purpose  of  making  a  military  offensive  or 
a  military  defense,  and  the  State  becomes  what 
in  peace  times  it  has  vainly  struggled  to  become — 
the  inexorable  arbiter  and  determinant  of  men's 
businesses  and  attitudes  and  opinions.  The  slack 
is  taken  up,  the  cross-currents  fade  out,  and  the 
nation  moves  lumberingly  and  slowly,  but  with 
ever  accelerated  speed  and  integration,  towards 
the  great  end,  towards  that  "peacefulness  of  being 
at  war,"  of  which  L,.  P.  Jacks  has  so  unforget- 
ably  spoken. 

The  classes  which  are  able  to  play  an  active 
and  not  merely  a  passive  role  in  the  organization 
for  war  get  a  tremendous  liberation  of  activity 
and  energy.  Individuals  are  jolted  out  of  their 
old  routine,  many  of  them  are  given  new  positions 

;    of  responsibility,  new  techniques  must  be  learnt. 

^    i  f  *  <*•  ^^ 

Wearing  home  ties  are  broken  and  women  who 

would   have    remained    attached    with    infantile 

bonds  are  liberated  for  service  overseas.     A  vast 

j  I  sense  of  rejuvenescence  pervades  the  significant 


*  V 
vx  *?/ 


V<  \N  OJT*\   ^v* 

classes,  a  sense  of  new  importance  in  the  world. 
Old  national  ideals  are  taken  out,  re-adapted  to 
the  purpose  and  used  as  universal  touchstones,  or 
molds  into  which  all  thought  is  poured.  Every 
individual  citizen  who  in  peacetimes  had  no  func- 
tion to  perform  by  which  he  could  imagine  himself 

0, 

an  expression  or  living  fragment  of  the  State  be- 
comes an  active  amateur  agent  of  the  Government 
in  reporting  spies  and  disloyalists,  in  raising  Gov- 
ernment funds,  or  in  propagating  such  measures 
as  are  considered  necessary  by  officialdom. 
Minority  opinion,  which  in  times  of  peace,  was 
only  irritating  and  could  not  be  dealt  with  by  law 
unless  it  was  conjoined  with  actual  crime,  becomes, 
with  the  outbreak  of  war,  a  case  for  outlawry. 
Criticism  of  the  State,  objections  to  war,  luke-  v 
warm  opinions  concerning  the  necessity  or  the 
befuty  of  conscription,  are  made  subject  to  fero- 
cious penalties,  far  exceeding  in  severity  those 
affixed  to  actual  pragmatic  crimes.  Public 
opinion,  as  expressed  in  the  newspapers,  and  the 
pulpits  and  the  schools,  becomes  one  solid  block. 
"Loyalty,"  or  rather  war  orthodoxy,  becomes  the 
sole  test  for  all  professions,  techniques,  occupa- 


v 

*« 
»•* 

-^     <• 

*•  .  , 


tions.  Particularly  is  this  true  in  the  sphere  of 
the  intellectual  life.  There  the  smallest  taint  is 
held  to  spread  over  the  whole  soul,  so  that  a  pro- 
fessor of  physics  is  ipso  facto  disqualified  to  teach 
physics  or  to  hold  honorable  place  in  a  university 
— the  republic  of  learning — if  he  is  at  all  un- 
sound on  the  war.  Even  mere  association  with 
persons  thus  tainted  is  considered  to  disqualify  a 
teacher.  Anything  pertaining  to  the  enemy  be- 
comes taboo.  His  books  are  suppressed  wherever 
possible,  his  language  is  forbidden.  His  artistic 
products  are  considered  to  convey  in  the  subtlest 
spiritual  way  taints  of  vast  poison  to  the  soul 
that  permits  itself  to  enjoy  them.  So  enemy 
music  is  suppressed,  and  energetic  measures  of 
opprobrium  taken  against  those  whose  artistic 
consciences  are  not  ready  to  perform  such  an  act 
of  self-sacrifice.  The  rage  for  loyal  conformity 
works  impartially,  and  often  in  diametric  opposi- 
tion to  other  orthodoxies  and  traditional  con- 
formities, or  even  ideals.  The  triumphant  ortho- 
doxy of  the  State  is  shown  at  its  apex  perhaps 
when  Christian  preachers  lose  their  pulpits,  for 
taking  more  or  less,  literal  terms  the  Sermon  on 

[144] 


the  Mount,  and  Christian  zealots  are  sent  to 
prison  for  twenty  years  for  distributing  tracts 
which  argue  that  war  is  unscriptural. 

War  is  the  health  of  the  State.  It  automatic- 
ally sets  in  motion  throughout  society  those  irre- 
sistible forces  for  uniformity,  for  passionate  co- 
operation with  the  Government  in  coercing  into 
obedience  the  minority  groups  and  individuals 
which  lack  the  larger  herd  sense.  The  machinery 
of  government  sets  and  enforces  the  drastic  pen- 
alties, the  minorities  are  either  intimidated  into 
silence,  or  brought  slowly  around  by  a  subtle  proc- 
ess of  persuasion  which  may  seem  to  them  really 
to  be  converting  them.  Of  course  the  ideal  of 
per/ect  loyalty,  perfect  uniformity  is  never  really 
attained.  The  classes  upon  whom  the  amateur 
work  of  coercion  falls  are  unwearied  in  their  zeal, 
but  often  their  agitation  instead  of  converting, 
merely  serves  to  stiffen  their  resistance.  Minori- 
ties are  rendered  sullen,  and  some  intellectual 
opinion  bitter  and  satirical.  But  in  general,  the 
nation  in  war-time  attains  a  uniformity  of  feeling, 
a  hierarchy  of  values  culminating  at  the  undis- 
puted apex  of  the  State  ideal,  which  could  not 

[145] 


possibly  be  produced  through  any  other  agency 
than  war.  v  Other  values  such  as  artistic  creation, 
knowledge,  reason,  beauty,  the  enhancement  of 
life,  are  instantly  and  almost  unanimously  sacri- 
ficed, and  the  significant  classes  who  have  con- 
stituted themselves  the  amateur  agents  of  the 
State,  are  engaged  not  only  in  sacrificing  these 
values  for  themselves  but  in  coercing  all  other 
persons  into  sacrificing  them. 

War — or  at  least  modern  war  waged  by  a 
democratic  republic  against  a  powerful  enemy — 
seems  to  achieve  for  a  nation  almost  all  that  the 
most  inflamed  political  idealist  could  desire. 
Citizens  are  no  longer  indifferent  to  their  Govern- 
ment, but  each  cell  of  the  body  politic  is  brimming 
with  life  and  activity.  We  are  at  last  on  the 
way  to  full  realization  of  that  collective  com- 
munity in  which  each  individual  somehow  con- 
tains the  virtue  of  the  whole.  In  a  nation  at 
war,  every  citizen  identifies  himself  with  the 
whole,  and  feels  immensely  strengthened  in  that 
identification.  The  purpose  and  desire  of  the  col- 
lective community  live  in  each  person  who  throws 
himself  whole-heartedly  into  the  cause  of  war. 


The  impeding  distinction  between  society  and  the 
individual  is  almost  blotted  out.  At  war,  the  in- 
dividual becomes  almost  identical  with  his  so- 
ciety. He  achieves  a  superb  self-assurance,  an 
intuition  of  the  Tightness  of  all  his  ideas  and 
emotions,  so  that  in  the  suppression  of  opponents 
or  heretics  he  is  invincibly  strong;  he  feels  behind 
him  all  the  power  of  the  collective  community. 
The  individual  as  social  being  in  war  seems  to 
have  achieved  almost  his  apotheosis.  Not  for  any 
religious  impulse  could  the  American  nation  have 
been  expected  to  show  such  devotion  en  masse,, 
such  sacrifice  and  labor.  Certainly  not  for  any 
secular  good,  such  as  universal  education  or  the 
subjugation  of  nature,  would  it  have  poured  forth 
its  treasure  and  its  life,  or  would  it  have  permitted 
such  stern  coercive  measures  to  be  taken  against 
it,  such  as  conscripting  its  money  and  its  men. 
But  for  the  sake  of  a  war  of  offensive  self-defense, 
undertaken  to  support  a  difficult  cause  to  the 
slogan  of  "democracy,"  it  would  reach  the  highest 
level  ever  known  of  collective  effort. 

For  these  secular  goods,  connected  with  the  en- 
hancement of  life,  the  education  of  man  and  the 

[  147  ] 


use  of  the  intelligence  to  realize  reason  and  beauty 
in  the  nation's  communal  living,  are  alien  to  our 
traditional  ideal  of  the  State.  The  State  is  in- 
timately connected  with  war,  for  it  is  the  organi- 
zation of  the  collective  community  when  it  acts  in 
a  political  manner,  and  to  act  in  a  political  man- 
ner towards  a  rival  group  has  meant,  throughout 
all  history — war. 

There  is  nothing  invidious  in  the  use  of  the 
term,  "herd,"  in  connection  with  the  State.  It  is 
merely  an  attempt  to  reduce  closer  to  first  prin- 
ciples the  nature  of  this  institution  in  the  shadow 
of  which  we  all  live,  move  and  have  our  being. 
Ethnologists  are  generally  agreed  that  human  so- 
ciety made  its  first  appearance  as  the  human  pack 
and  not  as  a  collection  of  individuals  or  of  couples. 
The  herd  is  in  fact  the  original  unit,  and  only  as 
it  was  differentiated  did  personal  individuality 
develop.  All  the  most  primitive  surviving  tribes 
of  men  are  shown  to  live  in  a  very  complex  but 
very  rigid  social  organization  where  opportunity 
•for  individuation  is  scarcely  given.  These  tribes 
remain  strictly  organized  herds,  and  the  difference 


^between  them  and  the  modern  State  is  one  of  de- 
gree of  sophistication  and  variety  of  organization, 
and  not  of  kind. 

Psychologists  recognize  the  gregarious  impulse 
as  one  of  the  strongest  primitive  pulls  which  keeps 
together  the  herds  of  the  different  species  of  higher 
animals.  Mankind  is  no  exception.  Our  pug- 
nacious evolutionary  history  has  prevented  the  im- 
pulse from  ever  dying  out.  This  gregarious 
impulse  is  the  tendency  to  imitate,  to  conform,  to 
coalesce  together,  and  is  most  powerful  when  the 
herd  believes  itself  threatened  with  attack. 
Animals  crowd  together  for  protection,  and  men 
become  most  conscious  of  their  collectivity  at  the 
threat  of  war.  Consciousness  of  collectivity 
brings  confidence  and  a  feeling  of  massed  strength, 
which  in  turn  arouses  pugnacity  and  the  battle  is 
on.  In  civilized  man,  the  gregarious  impulse  acts 
not  only  to  produce  concerted  action  for  defense, 
but  also  to  produce  identity  of  opinion.  Since 
thought  is  a  form  of  behavior,  the  gregarious  im- 
pulse floods  up  into  its  realms  and  demands  that 
sense  of  uniform  thought  which  wartime  produces 

[H9] 


so  successfully.  And  it  is  in  this  flooding  of  the 
conscious  life  of  society  that^regariousness  works 
its  havoc. 

For  just  as  in  modern  societies  the  sex-instinct  is 
enormously  over-supplied  for  the  requirements  of 
human  propagation,  so  the  gregarious  impulse  is 
enormously  over-;Supplied  for  the  work  of  protec- 
tion which  it  is  called  upon  to  perform.  It  would 
be  quite  enough  if  we  were  gregarious  enough  to 
enjoy  the  companionship  of  others,  to  be  able  to 
'  cooperate  with  them,  and  to  feel  a  slight  malaise 
at  solitude.  Unfortunately,  however,  this  im- 
pulse is  not  content  with  these  reasonable  and 
healthful  demands,  but  insists  that  like-minded- 
ness  shall  prevail  everywhere,  in  all  departments 
of  life.  So  that  all  human  progress,  all  novelty, 
and  non-conformity,  must  be  carried  against  the 
resistance  of  this  tyrannical  herd-instinct  which 
drives  the  individual  into  obedience  and  con- 
formity with  the  majority.  Even  in  the  most 
modern  and  enlightened  societies  this  impulse 
shows  little  sign  of  abating.  As  it  is  driven  by 
inexorable  economic  demand  out  of  the  sphere  of 
utility,  it  seems  to  fasten  itself  ever  more  fiercely 


in  the  realm  of  feeling  and  opinion,  so  that  con- 
formity comes  to  be  a  thing  aggressively  desired 
and  demanded. 

The  gregarious  impulse  keeps  its  hold  all  the 
Hiore  virulently  because  when  the  group  is  in  mo- 
tion or  is  taking  any  positive  action,  this  feeling 
of  being  with  and  supported  by  the  collective  herd 
very  greatly  feeds  that  will  to  power,  the  nourish- 
ment of  which  the  individual  organism  so  con- 
stantly demands.  You  feel  powerful  by  conform- 
ing, and  you  feel  forlorn  and  helpless  if  you  are* 
out  of  the  crowd.  While  even  if  you  do  not  get 
any  access  of  power  by  thinking  and  feeling  just 
as  everybody  else  in  your  group  does,  you  get  at 
least  the  warm  feeling  of  obedience,  the  soothing 
irresponsibility  of  protection. 

Joining  as  it  does  to  these  very  vigorous  ten- 
dencies of  the  individual — the  pleasure  in  power 
and  the  pleasure  in  obedience — this  gregarious 
impulse  becomes  irresistible  in  society.  War 
stimulates  it  to  ,the  highest  possible  degree,  send- 
ing the  influences  of  its  mysterious  herd-current 
with  its  inflations  ^of  power  and  obedience  to  the 
farthest  reaches  of  the  society,  to  every  individual 


and  .little  group  that  can  possibly  be  affected. 
And  it  is  these  impulses  which  the  State — the  or- 
ganization of  the  entire  herd,  the  entire  collectivity 
— is  founded  on  and  makes  use  of. 

There  is,  of  course,  in  the  feeling  towards  the 
State  a  large  element  of  pure  filial  mysticism. 
The  sense  of  insecurity,  the  desire  for  protection, 
sends  one's  desire  back  to  the  father  and  mother, 
with  whom  is  associated  the  earliest  feelings  of 
protection.  It  is  not  for  nothing  that  one's  State 
is  still  ^thought  of  as  Father  or  Motherland,  that 
one's  relation  towards  it  is  conceived  in  terms 
of  family  affection.  The  war  has  shown  that 
nowhere  under  the  shock  of  danger  have  these 
primitive  childlike  attitudes  failed  to  assert  them- 
selves again,  as  much  in  this  country  as  anywhere. 
If  we  have  not  the  intense  Father-sense  of  the 
German  who  worships  his  Vaterland,  at  least  in 
Uncle  Sam  we  have  a  symbol  of  protecting,  kindly 
authority,  and  in  the  many  Mother-posters  of  the 
Red  Cross,  we  see  how  easily  in  the  more  tender 
functions  of  war  service,  the  ruling  organization 
is  conceived  in  family  terms.  A  people  at  war 
have  become  in  the  most  literal  sense  obedient, 

[152] 


respectful,  trustful  children  again,  full  of  that 
naive  faith  in  the  all-wisdom  and  all-power  of  the 

x. 

adult  who  takes  care  of  them,  imposes  his  mild  but 
necessary  rule  upon  them  and  in  whom  they  lose 
their  responsibility  and  anxieties.  In  this  recru- 
descence of  the  child,  -there  is  great  comfort,  and 
a  certain  influx  of  power.  On  most  people  the 
strain  of  being  an  independent  adult  weighs 
heavily,  and  upon  none  more  than  those  members 
of  the  significant  classes  who  have  had  bequeathed 
to  them  or  have  assumed  the  responsibilities  of 
governing.  The  State  provides  the  convenientest 
of  symbols  under  which  these  classes  can  retain  all 
the  actual  pragmatic  satisfaction  of  governing,  but 
can  rid  themselves  of  the  psychic  burden  of  adult- 
hood. They  continue  to  direct  industry  and  gov- 
ernment and  all  the  institutions  of  society  pretty 
much  as  before,  but  in  their  own  conscious  eyes 
and  in  the  eyes  of  the  general  public,  they  are 
turned  from  their  selfish  and  predatory  ways,  and 
have  become  loyal  servants  of  society,  or  some- 
thing greater  than  they — the  State.  The  man 
who  moves  from  the  direction  of  a  large  business 
in  New  York  to  a  post  in  the  war  management 

[153] 


industrial  service  in  Washington  does  not 
apparently  alter  very  much  his  power  or  his 
administrative  technique.  But  psychically,  what 
a  transfiguration  has  occurred!  His  is  now  not 
only  the  power  but  the  glory !  And  his  sense  of 
satisfaction  is  directly  proportional  not  to  the 
genuine  amount  of  personal  sacrifice  that  may  be 
involved  in  the  change  but  to  the  extent  to  which 
he  retains  his  industrial  prerogatives  and  sense  of 
command. 

From  members  of  this  class  a  certain  insuperable 
indignation  arises  if  the  change  from  private 
enterprise  to  State  service  involves  any  real  loss 
of  power  and  personal  privilege.  If  there  is  to  be 
pragmatic  sacrifice,  let  it  be,  they  feel,  on  the 
field  of  honor,  in  the  traditionally  acclaimed 
deaths  by  battle,  in  that  detour  to  suicide,  as 
Nietzsche  calls  war.  The  State  in  wartime  sup- 
plies satisfaction  for  this  very  real  craving,  but  its 
chief  value  is  the  opportunity  it  gives  for  this 
.  regression  to  infantile  attitudes.  In  your  reaction 
to  an  imagined  attack  on  your  country  or  an  insult 
'to  its  government,  you  draw  closer  to  the  herd  for 
protection,  you  conform  in  word  and  deed,  and 

[154] 


you  insist  vehemently  that  everybody  else  shall 
think,  speak  and  act  together.  And  you  fix  your 
adoring  gaze  upon  the  State,  with  a  truly  filial 
look,  as  upon  the  Father  of  the  'flock,  the  quasi- 
personal  symbol  of  the  strength  of  the  herd,  and 
the  leader  and  determinant  of  your  definite  action 
and  ideas. 

The  members  of  the  working-classes,  that  por- 
tion at  least  which  dqes  not  identify  itself  with 
the  significant  classes  and  seek  to  imitate  it  and 
rise  to  it,  are  notoriously  less  affected  by  the 
symbolism  of  the  State,  or,  in  other  words,  are 
less  patriotic  than  the  significant  classes.  For 
theirs  is  neither  the  power  nor  the  glory.  The 
State  in  wartime  does  not  offer  them  the  oppor- 
tunity to  regress,  for,  never  having  acquired  social 
adulthood,  they  cannot  lose  it.  If  they  haye  been 
drilled  and  regimented,  as  by  the  industrial 
regime  of  the  last  century,  they  go  out  docilely 
enough  to  do  battle  for  their  State,  but  they  are 
almost  entirely  without  that  filial  sense  and  even 
without  that  herd-intellect  sense  which  operates 
so  powerfully  among  their  "betters."  They  live 
habitually  in  an  industrial  serfdom,  by  which 

[155] 


though  nominally  free,  they  are  in  practice  as  a 
class  bound  to  a  system  of  machine-production 
the  implements  of  which  they  do  not  own,  and  in 
the  distribution  of  whose  product  they  have  not 
the  slightest  voice,  except  what  they  can  occa- 
sionally exert  by  a  veiled  intimidation  which 
draws  slightly  more  of  the  product  in  their  direc- 
tion. From  such  serfdom,  military  conscription 
is  not  so  great  a  change.  But  into  the  military 
enterprise  they  go,  not  with  those  hurrahs  of  the 
significant  classes  whose  instincts  war  so  power- 
fully feeds,  but  with  the  same  apathy  with  which 
they  enter  and  continue  in  the  industrial  enter- 
prise. 

From  this  point  of  view,  war  can  be  called 
almost ''an  upper-class  sport.  The  novel  interests 
and  excitements  it  provides,  the  inflations  of 
power,  the  satisfaction  it  gives  to  those  very 
,  tenacious  human  impulses — gregariousness  and 
parent-regression — endow  it  with  all  the  qualities 
of  a  luxurious  collective  game  which  is  felt  in- 
tensely just  in  proportion  to  the  sense  of  signifi- 
cant rule  the  person  has  in  the  class-division  of 
his  society.  A  country  at  war — particularly  our 


own  country  at  war — does  not  act  as  a  purely 
homogeneous  herd.  The  significant  classes  have 
all  the  herd-feeling  in  all  its  primitive  intensity, 
but  there  are  barriers,  or  at  least  differentials  of 
intensity,  so  that  this  feeling  does  not  flow  freely 
without  impediment  throughout  the  entire  nation. 
A  modern  country  represents  a  long  historical  and 
social  process  of  disaggregation  of  the  herd.  The 
nation  at  peace  is  not  a  group,  it  is  a  network  of 
myriads  of  groups  representing  the  cooperation 
and  similar  feeling  of  men  on  all  sorts  of  planes 
and  in  all  sorts  of  human  interests  and  enterprises. 
In  every  modern  industrial  country,  there  are 
parallel  planes  of  economic  classes  with  divergent 
attitudes  and  institutions  and  interests — bourgeois 
and  proletariat,  with  their  many  subdivisions  ac- 
cording to  power  and  function,  and  even  their 
interweaving,  such  as  those  more  highly  skilled 
workers  who  habitually  identify  themselves  with 
the  owning  and  the  significant  classes  and  strive 
to  raise  themselves  to  the  bourgeois  level,  imitat- 
ing their  cultural  standards  and  manners.  Then 
there  are  religious  groups  with  a  certain  definite, 
though  weakening  sense  of  kinship,  and  there  are 


the  powerful  ethnic  groups  which  behave  almost 
as  cultural  colonies  in  the  New  World,  clinging 
tenaciously  to  language  and  historical  tradition, 
though  their  herdishness  is  usually  founded  on 
cultural  rather  than  State  symbols.  There  are 
even  certain  vague  sectional  groupings.  All  these 
.  small  sects,  political  parties,  classes,  levels,  in- 
-i  terests,  may  act  as  foci  for  herd-feelings.  They 
intersect  and  interweave,  and  the  same  person  may 
be  a  member  of  several  different  groups  lying  at 
different  planes.  Different  occasions  will  set  off 
his  herd-feeling  in  one  direction  or  another.  In  a 
religious  crisis  he  will  'be  intensely  conscious  of  the 
necessity  that  his  sect  (or  sub-herd)  may  prevail; 
in  a  political  campaign,  that  his  party  shall 
triumph. 

To  the  spread  of  herd-feeling,  therefore,  all 
these  smaller  herds  offer  resistance.  To  the 
spread  of  that  herd-feeling  which  arises  from  the 
threat  of  war,  and  which  would  normally  involve 
the  entire  nation,  the  only  groups  which  make 
serious  resistance  are  those,  of  course,  which  con- 
tinue to  identify  themselves  with  the  other  nation 
from  which  they  or  their  parents  have  come.  In 

[158] 


times  of  peace  they  are  for  all  practical  purposes 
citizens  of  their  new  country.  They  keep  alive 
their  ethnic  traditions  more  as  a  luxury  than  any- 
thing. Indeed  these  traditions  tend  rapidly  to 
die  out  except  where  they  connect  with  some  still 
unresolved  nationalistic  cause  abroad,  with  some 
struggle  for  freedom,  or  some  irredentism.  If 

they  are  consciously  opposed  by  a  too  invidious 

• 

policy  of  Americanism,  they  tend  to  be  strength- 
ened. And  in  time  of  war,  these  ethnic  elements 
which  have  any  traditional  connection  with  the 
enemy,  even  though  most  of  the  individuals  may 
have  little  real  sympathy  with  the  enemy's  cause, 
are  naturally  lukewarm  to  the  herd-feeling  of  the 
nation  which  goes  back  to  State  traditions  in 
which  they  have  no  share.  But  to  the  natives 
imbued  with  State-feeling,  any  such  resistance  or 
apathy  is  intolerable.  This  herd-feeling,  this 
newly  awakened  consciousness  of  the  State,  de- 
mands universality.  The  leaders  of  the  signifi- 
cant classes,  who  feel  most  intensely  this  State- 
compulsion,  demand  a  one  hundred  per  cent. 
Americanism,  among  one  hundred  per  cent,  of  the 
population.  The  State  is  a  jealous  God  and  will 

[-59] 


brook  no  rivals.  Its  sovereignty  must  pervade 
every  one,  and  all  feeling  must  be  run  into  the 
stereotyped  forms  of  romantic  patriotic  militarism 
which  is  the  traditional  expression  of  the  State 
herd-feeling. 

Thus  arises  conflict  within  the  State.  War 
becomes  almost  a  sport  between  the  hunters  and 
the  hunted.  The  pursuit  of  enemies  within  out- 
weighs in  psychic  attractiveness  the  assault  on  the 
enemy  without.  The  whole  terrific  force  of  the 
State  is  brought  to  bear  against  the  heretics.  The 
nation  boils  with  a  slow  insistent  fever.  A  white 
terrorism  is  carried  on  by  the  Government  against 
pacifists,  Socialists,  enemy  aliens,  and  a  milder  un- 
official persecution  against  all  persons  or  move- 
ments  that  can  be  imagined  as  connected  with  the 
enemy.  War,  which  should  be  the  health  of  the 
"State,  unifies  all  the  bourgeois  elements  and  the 
common  people,  and  outlaws  the  rest.  The 
revolutionary  proletariat  shows  more  resistance  to 
this  unification,  is,  as  we  have  seen,  psychically 
out  of  the  current.  Its  vanguard,  as  the  I.  W.  W., 
is  remorselessly  pursued,  in  spite  of  the  proof  that 
it  is  a  symptom,  not  a  cause,  and  its  prosecution 
[,6o] 


increases  the  disaffection  of  labor  and  intensifies 
the  friction  instead  of  lessening  it.  ' 

But  the  emotions  that  play  around  the  defense 
of  the  State  do  not  take  into  consideration  the 
pragmatic  results.  A,  nation  at  war,  led  by  its' 
significant  classes,  is  engaged  in  liberating  certain 
of  its  impulses  which  have  had  all  too  little  exer- 
cise in  the  past.  It  is  getting  certain  satisfactions 
and  the  actual  conduct  of  the  war  or  the  condition 
of  the  country  are  really  incidental  to  the  enjoy- 
ment of  new  forms  of  virtue  and  power  and' 
aggressiveness.  If  it  could  be  shown  conclusively 
that  the  persecution  of  slightly  disaffected  ele- 
ments actually  increased  enormously  the  difficul- 
ties of  production  and  the  organization  of  the  war 
technique,  it  would  be  found  that  public  policy 
would  scarcely  change.  The  significant  classes 
must  have  their  pleasure  in  hunting  down  and 
chastizing  everything  that  they  feel  instinctively 
to  be  not  imbued  with,  the  current  State- 
enthusiasm,  though  the  State  itself  be  actually 
impeded  in  its  efforts  to  carry  out  those  objects 
for  which  they  are  passionately  contending.  The 
best  proof  of  this  is  that  with  a  pursuit  of  plotters 

[161] 


that  has  continued  with  ceaseless  vigilance  ever 
since  the  beginning  of  the  war  in  Europe,  the 
^concrete  crimes  unearthed  and  punished  have 
been  fewer  than  those  prosecutions  for  the  mere 
,crime  of  opinion  or  the  expression  of  sentiments 
critical  of  the  State  or  the  national  policy.  The 
punishment  for  opinion  has  been  far  more  fero- 
cious and  unintermittent  than  the  punishment  of 
pragmatic  crime.  Unimpeachable  Anglo-Saxon 
Americans  who  were  freer  of  pacifist  or  socialist 
utterance  than  the  State-obsessed  ruling  public 
opinion,  received  heavier  penalties  and  even 
greater  opprobrium,  in  many  instances,  than  the 
definitely  hostile  German  plotter.  A  public 
opinion  which,  almost  without  protest,  accepts  as 
just,  adequate,  beautiful,  deserved  and  in  fitting 
harmony  with  ideals  of  liberty  and  freedom  of 
speech,  a  sentence  of  twenty  years  in  prison  for 
mere  utterances,  no  matter  what  they  may  be, 
shows  itself  to  be  suffering  from  a  kind  of  social 
derangement  of  values,  a  sort  of  social  neurosis, 
that  deserves  analysis  and  comprehension. 

On  our  entrance  into  the  war,  there  were  many 
persons  who  predicted  exactly  this  derangement 

.62 


of  values,  who  feared  lest  democracy  suffer  more 
at  home  from  an  America  at  war  than  could  be 
gained  for  democracy  abroad.  That  fear  has  been 
amply  justified.  The  question  whether  the 
American  nation  would  act  like  an  enlightened 
democracy  going  to  war  for  the  sake  of  high  ideals, 
or  like  a  State-obsessed  herd,  has  been  decisively 
answered.  The  record  is  written  and  cannot  be 
erased.  History  will  decide  whether  the  terrori- 
zation  of  opinion,  and  the  regimentation  of  life 
was  justified  under  the  most  idealistic  of  demo- 
cratic administrations.  It  will  see  that  when  the 
American  nation  had  ostensibly  a  chance  to  con- 
duct a  gallant  war,  with  scrupulous  regard  to  the 
safety  of  democratic  values  at  home,  it  chose 
rather  to  adopt  all  the  most  obnoxious  and  coercive 
techniques  of  the  enemy  and  of  the  other  countries 
at  war,  and  to  rival  in  intimidation  and  ferocity 
of  punishment  the  worst  governmental  systems  of 
the  age.  For  its  former  unconsciousness  and  dis- 
respect of  the  State  ideal,  the  nation  apparently 
paid  the  penalty  in  a  violent  swing  to  the  other 
extreme.  It  acted  so  exactly  like  a  herd  in  its 
irrational  coercion  of  minorities  that  there  is  no 

[163] 


artificiality  in  interpreting  the  progress  of  the  war 
in  terms  of  the  herd  psychology.  It  unwittingly 
brought  out  into  the  strongest  relief  the  true  char- 
acteristics of  the  State  and  its  intimate  alliance 
with  war.  It  provided  for  the  enemies  of  war 
and  the  critics  of  the  State  the  most  telling  argu- 
ments possible.  The  new  passion  for  the  State 
ideal  unwittingly  set  in  motion  and  encouraged 
forces  that  threaten  very  materially  to  reform  the 
State.  It  has  shown  those  who  are  really  deter- 
mined to  end  war  that  the  problem  is  not  the 
mere  simple  one  of  finishing  a  war  that  will  end 
war. 

For  war  is  a  complicated  way  in  which  a  nation 
acts,  and  it  acts  so  out  of  a  spiritual  compulsion 
which  pushes  it  on,  perhaps  against  all  its  interests, 
all  its  real  desires,  and  all  its  real  sense  of  values. 
It  is  States  that  make  wars  and  not  nations,  and 
the  very  thought  and  almost  necessity  of  war  is 
bound  up  with  the  ideal  of  the  State.  Not  for 
centuries  have  nations  made  war;  in  fact  the  only 
historical  example  of  nations  making  war  is  the 
great  barbarian  invasions  into  southern  Europe, 
the  invasions  of  Russia  from  the  East,  and  per- 


haps  the  sweep  of  Islam  through  Northern  Africa 
into  Europe  after  Mohammed's  death.  And  the 
motivations  for  such  wars  were  either  the  restless 
expansion  of  migratory  tribes  or  the  flame  of  reli- 
gious fanaticism.  Perhaps  these  great  movements 
could  scarcely  be  called  wars  at  all,  for  war  implies 
an  organized  people  drilled  and  led;  in  fact,  k 
necessitates  the  State.  Ever  since  Europe  has  had 
any  such  organization,  such  huge  conflicts  between 
nations — nations,  that  is,  as  cultural  groups — 
have  been  unthinkable.  It  is  preposterous  to  as- 
sume that  for  centuries  in  Europe  there  would 
have  been  any  possibility  of  a  people  en  masse, 
(with  their  own  leaders,  and  not  with  the  leaders 
of  their  duly  constituted  State),  rising  up  and 
overflowing  their  borders  in  a  war  raid  upon  a 
neighboring  people.  The  wars  of  the  Revolu- 
tionary armies  of  France  were  clearly  in  defense 
of  an  imperiled  freedom,  and,  moreover,  they 
were  clearly  directed  not  against  other  peoples, 
but  against  the  autocratic  governments  that  were 
combining  to  crush  the  Revolution.  There  is 
no  instance  in  history  of  a  genuinely  national 
war.  There  are  instances  of  national  defenses, 


among  primitive  civilizations  such  as  the  Balkan 
peoples,  against  intolerable  invasion  by  neighbor- 
ing despots  or  oppression.  But  war,'  as  such,  can- 
not occur  except  in  a  system  of  competing  States, 
which  have  relations  with  each  other  through  the 
channels  of  diplomacy. 

War  is  a  function  of  this  system  of  States,  and 
could  not  occur  except  in  such  a  system.  Nations 
organized  for  internal  administration,  nations  or- 
ganized as  a  federation  of  free  communities, 
nations  organized  in  any  way  except  that  of  a 
political  centralization  of  a  dynasty,  or  the  re- 
formed descendant  of  a  dynasty,  could  not  pos- 
sibly make  war  upon  each  other.  They  would  not 
only  have  no  motive  for  conflict,  but  they  would 
be  unable  to  muster  the  concentrated  force  to  make 
war  effective.  There  might  be  all  sorts  of 
amateur  marauding,  there  might  be  guerilla  ex- 
peditions of  group  against  group,  but  there  could 
not  be  that  terrible  war  en  masse  of  the  national 
State,  that  exploitation  of  the  nation  in  the  in- 
terests of  the  State,  that  abuse  of  the  national  life 
and  resource  in  the  frenzied  mutual  suicide,  which 
<is  modern  war. 

[166] 


It  cannot  be  too  firmly  realized  that  war  is  a 
function  of  States  and  not  of  nations,  indeed  that 
it  is  the  chief  function  of  States.  War  is  a  very 
artificial  thing.  It  is  not  the  naive  spontaneous 
outburst  of  herd  pugnacity ;  it  is  no  more  primary 
than  is  formal  religion.  War  cannot  exist  with- 
out a  military  establishment,  and  a  military  estab- 
lishment cannot  exist  without  a  State  organization. 
War  has  an  immemorial  tradition  and  heredity 
only  because  the  State  has  a  long  tradition  and 
heredity.  But  they  are  inseparably  and  function- 
ally joined.  We  cannot  crusade  against  war 
without  crusading  implicitly  against  the  State. 
And  we  cannot  expect,  or  take  measures  to  ensure, 
that  this  war  is  a  war  to  end  war,  unless  at  the 
same  time  we  take  measures  to  end  the  State  in 
its- traditional  form.  The  State  is  not  the  nation, 
and  the  State  can  be  modified  and  even  abolished 
in  its  present  form,  without  harming  the  nation. 
On  the  contrary,  with  the  passing  of  the  dominance 
of  the  State,  the  genuine  life-enhancing  forces  of 
the  nation  will  be  liberated.  If  the  State's  chief 
function  is  war,  then  the  State  must  suck  out  of 
the  nation  a  large  part  of  its  energy  for  its  purely 

[167] 


sterile  purposes  of  defense  and  aggression.     It  de- 
votes to  waste  or  to  actual  destruction  as  much 

•    4MM*  * 

as  it  can  of  the  vitality  of  trie  nation.  No  one 
,  will  deny  that  war  is  a  vast  complex  of  life- 
destroying  and  life-crippling  forces.  If  the 
State's  chief  function  is  war,  then  it  is  chiefly 
concerned  with  coordinating  and  developing  the 
powers  and  techniques  which  make  for  destruction. 
And  this  means  not  only  the  actual  and  potential 
destruction  of  the  enemy,  but  of  the  nation  at 
home  as  well.  For  the  very  existence  of  a  State 
in  a  system  of  States  means  that  the  nation  lies 
always  under  a  risk  of  war  and  invasion,  and  the 
calling  away  of  energy  into  military  pursuits 
means  a  crippling  of  the  productive  and  life- 
enhancing  processes  of  the  national  life. 

All  this  organizing  of  death-dealing  energy  and 
technique  is  not  a  natural  but  a  very  sophisticated 
process.  Particularly  in  modern  nations,  but  also 
all  through  the  course  of  modern  European  his- 
tory, it  could  never  exist  without  the  State.  For 
it  meets  the  demands  of  no  other  institution,  it 
foflbws  the  desires  of  no  religious,  industrial,  po- 
litical group.  If  the  demand  for  military  organi- 

[168] 


zation  and  a  military  establishment  seems  to  come 
not  from  the  officers  of  the  State  but  from  the 
public,  it  is  only  that  it  comes  from  the  State- 
obsessed  portion  of  the  public,  those  groups  which 
feel  most  keenly  the  State  ideal.  And  in  this 
country  we  have  had  evidence  all  too  indubitable- 
how  powerless  the  pacifically  minded  officers  of 
State  may  be  in  the  face  of  a  State-obsession  of  the 
significant  classes.  If  a  powerful  section  ,of  the 
significant  classes  feels  more  intensely  the  attitudes 
of  the  State,  then  they  will  most  infallibly 'mold 
the  Government  in  time  to  their  wishes,  bring  it 
back  to  act  as  the  embodiment  of  the  State  which 
it  pretends  to  be.  In  every  country  we  have  seen 
groups  that  were  more  loyal  than  the  king — more 
patriotic  than  the  Government — the  Ulsterites  in 
Great  Britain,  the  Junkers  in  Prussia,  1'Action 
Franchise  in  France,  onr  patrioteers  in  America. 
These  groups  exist  to  keep  the  steering  wheel  of 
the  State  straight,  and  they  prevent  the  nation 
from  ever  veering  very  far  from  the  State  ideal. 

Militarism  expresses  the  desires  and  satisfies  the 
major  impulse  only  of  this  class.  The  other 
classes,  left  to  themselves,  have  too  many  necessi- 

;         [169] 


ties  and  interests  and  ambitions,  to  concern  them- 
selves with  so  expensive  and  destructive  a  game. 
But  the  State-obsessed  group  is  either  able  to  get 
control  of  the  machinery  of  the  State  or  to  intimi- 
date those  in  control,  so  that  it  is  able  through  use 
of  the  collective  force  to  regiment  the  other  grudg- 
ing and  reluctant  classes  into  a  military  pro- 
gramme. State  idealism  percolates  down  through 
the  strata  of  society;  capturing  groups  and  in- 
dividuals just  in  proportion  to  the  prestige  of  this 
dominant  class.  So  that  we  have  the  herd 
actually  strung  along  between  two  extremes,  the 
militaristic  patriots  at  one  end,  who  are  scarcely 
distinguishable  in  attitude  and  animus  from  the 
.  most  reactionary  Bourbons  of  an  Empire,  and  un- 
skilled labor  groups,  which  entirely  lack  the  State 
sense.  But  the  State  acts  as  a  whole,  and  the  class 
that  controls  governmental  machinery  can  swing 
the  effective  action  of  the  herd  as  a  whole.  The 
herd  is  not  actually  a  whole,  emotionally.  But 
by  an  ingenious  mixture  of  cajolery,  agitation,  in- 
timidation, the  herd  is  licked  into  shape,  into  an 
effective  mechanical  unity,  if  not  into  a  spiritual 

[  170] 


whole.  Men  are  told  simultaneously  that  they 
will  enter  the  military  establishment  of  their  own 
volition,  as  their  splendid  sacrifice  for  their  coun- 
try's welfare,  and  that  if  they  do  not  enter  they 
will  be  hunted  down  and  punished  with  the  most 
horrid  penalties;  and  under  a  most  indescribable 
confusion  of  democratic  pride  and  personal  fear 
they  submit  to  the  destruction  of  their  livelihood 
if  not  their  lives,  in  a  way  that  would  formerly 
have  seemed  to  them  so  obnoxious  as  to  be 
incredible. 

In  this  great  herd-machinery,  dissent  is  like 
sand  in  the  bearings.  The  State  ideal  is  primarily 
a  sort  of  blind  animal  push  towards  military  unity. 
Any  interference  with  that  unity  turns  the  whole 
vast  impulse  towards  crushing  it.  Dissent/  is 
speedily  outlawed,  and  the  Government,  backed 
by  the  significant  classes  and  those  who  in  every 
locality,  however  small,  identify  themselves  with 
them,  proceeds  against  the  outlaws,  regardless  of 

their  value  to  the  other  institutions  of  the  nation, 

* ' 

or  to  the  effect  their  persecution  may  have  on 
public  opinion.  The  herd  becomes  divided  into 

[171] 


the  hunters  and  the  hunted,  and  war-enterprise 
becomes  not  only  a  technical  game  but  a  sport  as 
well. 

It  must  never  be  forgotten  that  nations  do  not 
declare  war  on  each  other,  nor  in  the  strictest  sense 
is  it  nations  that  fight  each  other.  Much  has  been 
said  to  the  effect  that  modern  wars  are  wars  of 
whole  peoples  and  not  of  dynasties.  Because  the 
entire  nation  is  regimented  and  the  whole  resources 
of  the  country  are  levied  on  for  war,  this  does  not 
mean  that  it  is  the  country  qua  country  which  is 
fighting.  It  is  the  country  organized  as  a  State 
that  is  fighting,  and  only  as  a  State  would  it  pos- 
sibly fight.  So,  literally,  it  is  States  which  make 
war  on  each  other  and  not  peoples.  Governments 
are  the  agents  of  States,  and  it  is  Governments 
which  declare  war  on  each  other,  acting  truest  to 
form  in  the  interests  of  the  great  State  ideal  they 
represent.  There  is  no  case  known  in  modern 
times  of  the  people  being  consulted  in  the  initia- 
tion of  a  war.  The  present  demand  for  demo- 
cratic control  of  foreign  policy  indicates  how 
completely,  even  in  the  most  democratic  of  modern 
nations,  foreign  policy  has  been  the  secret  private 

[172] 


possession  of  the  executive  branch  of  the  Govern- 
ment. 

However  representative  of  the  people  Parlia- 
ments and  Congresses  may  be  in  all  that  concerns 
the  internal  administration  of  a  country's  political 
affairs,  in  international  relations  it  has  never  been 
possible  to  maintain  that  the  popular  body  acted 
except  as  a  wholly  mechanical  ratifier  of  the 
Executive's  will.  The  formality  by  which  Par- 
liaments and  Congresses  declare  war  is  the  merest 
technicality.  Before  such  a  declaration  can  take 
place,  the  country  will  have  been  brought  to  the 
very  brink  of  war  by  the  foreign  policy  of  the 
Executive.  A  long  series  of  steps  on  the  down- 
ward path,  each  one  more  fatally  committing  the 
unsuspecting  country  to  a  warlike  course  of  action 
will  have  been  taken  without  either  the  people  or 
its  representatives  being  consulted  or  expressing 
its  feeling.  When  the  declaration  of  war  is 
finally  demanded  by  the  Executive,  the  Parlia- 
ment or  Congress  could  not  refuse  it  without 
reversing  the  course  of  history,  without  repudiat- 
ing what  has  been  representing  itself  in  the  eyes 
of  the  other  States  as  the  symbol  and  interpreter 

[173] 


of  the  nation's  will  and  animus.  To  repudiate  an 
Executive  at  that  time  would  be  to  publish  to  the 
entire  world  the  evidence  that  the  country  had 
been  grossly  deceived  by  its  own  Government,  that 
the  country  with  an  almost  criminal  carelessness 
had  allowed  its  Government  to  commit  it  to  gigan* 
tic  national  enterprises  in  which  irhad  no  heart. 
In  such  a  crisis,  even  a  Parliament  which  in  the 
most  democratic  States  represents  the  common  man 
and  not  the  significant  classes  who  most  strongly 
cherish  the  State  ideal,  will  cheerfully  sustain  the 
foreign  policy  which  it  understands  even  less  than 
it  would  care  for  if  it  understood,  and  will  vote 
almost  unanimously  for  an  incalculable  war,  in 
which  the  nation  may  be  brought  well  nigh  to 
ruin.  That  is  why  the  referendum  which  was  ad- 
vocated by  some  people  as  a  test  of  American  senti- 
ment in  entering  the  war  was  considered  even  by 
thoughtful  democrats  to  be  something  subtly  im- 
proper. The  die  had  been  cast.  Popular  whim 
could  only  derange  and  bungle  monstrously  the 
majestic  march  of  State  policy  in  its  new  crusade 
for  the  peace  of  the  world.  The  irresistible  State 
ideal  got  hold  of  the  bowels  of  men.  Whereas 

[174] 


up  to  this  time,  it  had  been  irreproachable  to  be 
neutral  in  word  and  deed,  for  the  foreign  policy  of 
the  State  had  so  decided  it,  henceforth  it  became 
the  most  arrant  crime  to  remain  neutral.  The 
Middle  West,  which  had  been  soddenly  pacifistic 
in  our  days  of  neutrality,  became  in  a  few  months 
just  as  soddenly  bellicose,  and  in  its  zeal  for 
witch-burnings  and  its  scent  for  enemies  within 
gave  precedence  to  no  section  of  the  country.  The 
herd-mind  followed  faithfully  the  State-mind  and, 
the  agitation  for  a  referendum  being  soon  for- 
gotten, the  country  fell  into  the  universal  conclu- 
sion that,  since  its  Congress  had  formally  declared 
the  war,  the  nation  itself  had  in  the  most  solemn 
and  universal  way  devised  and  brought  on  the 
entire  affair.  Oppression  of  minorities  became 
justified  on  the  plea  that  the  latter  were  perversely 
resisting  the  rationally  constructed  and  solemnly 
declared  will  of  a  majority  of  the  nation.  The 
herd-coalescence  of  opinion  which  became  inevit- 
able the  moment  the  State  had  set  flowing  the  war- 
attitudes  became  interpreted  as  a  pre-war  popular 
decision,  and  disinclination  to  bow  to  the  herd  was 
treated  as  a  monstrously  anti-social  act.  So  that 

[175] 


the  State,  which  had  vigorously  resisted  the  idea 
of  a  referendum  and  clung  tenaciously  and,  of 
course,  with  entire  success  to  its  autocratic  and 
absolute  control  of  foreign  policy,  had  the  pleasure 
of  seeing  the  country,  within  a  few  months,  given 
over  to  the  retrospective  impression  that  a  genuine 
referendum  had  taken  place.  When  once  a 
country  has  lapped  up  these  State  attitudes,  its 
memory  fades;  it  conceives  itself  not  as  merely 
accepting,  but  of  having  itself  willed  the  whole 
policy  and  technique  of  war.  The  significant 
.classes  with  their  trailing  satellites,  identify  them- 
selves with  the  State,  so  that  what  the  State, 
through  the  agency  of  the  Government,  has  willed, 
this  majority  conceives  itself  to  have  willed. 

All  of  which  goes  to  show  that  the  State  repre- 
sents all  the  autocratic,  arbitrary,  coercive, 
belligerent  forces  within  a  social  group,  it  is  a 
sort  of  complexus  of  everything  most  distasteful 
to  the  modern  free  creative  spirit,  the  feeling  for 
life^  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  War 
is  the  health  of  the  State.  Only  when  the  State 
is  at  war  does  the  modern  society  function  with 
that  unity  of  sentiment,  simple  uncritical  patriotic 

[176] 


devotion,  cooperation  of  services,  which  have  al- 
ways been  the  ideal  of  the  State  lover.  With  the 
ravages  of  democratic  ideas,  however,  the  modern 
republic  cannot  go  to  war  under  the  old  concep- 
tions of  autocracy  and  death-dealing  belligerency. 
If  a  successful  animus  for  war  requires  a 
renaissance  of  State  ideals,  they  can  only  come 
back  under  democratic  forms,  under  this  retro- 
spective conviction  of  democratic  control'  of 
foreign  policy,  democratic  desire  for  war,  and  par- 
ticularly of  this  identification  of  the  democracy 
with  the  State.  How  unregenerate  the  ancient 
State  may  be,  however,  is  indicated  by  the  laws 
against  sedition,  and  by  the  Government's  unre- 
formed  attitude  on  foreign  policy.  One  of  the 
first  demands  of  the  more  far-seeing  democrats  in 
the  democracies  of  the  Alliance  was  that  secret 
diplomacy  must  go.  The  war  was  seen  to  have 
been  made  possible  by  a  web  of  secret  agreements 
between  States,  alliances  that  were  made  by  Gov- 
ernments without  the  shadow  of  popular  support 
or  even  popular  knowledge,  and  vague,  half-under- 
stood commitments  that  scarcely  reached  the  stage 
of  a  treaty  or  agreement,  but  which  proved  bind- 

[177] 


.ing  in  the  event.  Certainly,  said  these  democratic 
thinkers,  war  can  scarcely  be  avoided  unless  this 
poisonous  underground  system  of  secret  diplomacy 
is  destroyed,  this  system  by  which  a  nation's 
power,  wealth  and  manhood  may  be  signed  away 
like  a  blank  check  to  an  allied  nation  to  be  cashed 
in  at  some  future  crisis.  Agreements  which  are 

"  to  affect  the  lives  of  whole  peoples  must  be  made 
between  peoples  and  not  by  Governments,  or  at 
least  by  their  representatives  in  the  full  glare  of 
publicity  and  criticism. 

Such  a  demand  for  "democratic  control  of 
foreign  policy"  seemed  axiomatic.  Even  if  the 
country  had  been  swung  into  war  by  steps  taken 
secretly  and  announced  to  the  public  only  after 
they  had  been  consummated,  it  was  felt  that  that 
attitude  of  the  American  State  towards  foreign 
policy  was  only  a  relic  of  the  bad  old  days  and 
must  be  superseded  in  the  new  order.  The 
American  President  himself,  the  liberal  hope  of 
the  world,  had  demanded,  in  the  eyes  of  the  world, 
open  diplomacy,  agreements  freely  and  openly 
arrived  at.  Did  this  mean  a  genuine  transference 
of  power  in  this  most  crucial  of  State  functions 


from     Government     to    people?     Not     at     all.  , 
When  the  question  recently  came  to  a  challenge 
in  Congress,  and  the  implications  of  open  discus- 
sion were  somewhat  specifically  discussed,  and  the 

desirabilities  frankly  commended,  the  President  let 
/  < 

his  disapproval  be  known  in  no  uncertain  way. 
No  one  ever  accused  Mr.  Wilson  of  not  being  a 
State  idealist,  and  whenever  democratic  aspira- 
tions swung  ideals  too  far  out  of  the  State  orbit, 
he  could  be  counted  on  to  react  vigorously.  Here 
was  a  clear  case  of  conflict  between  democratic 
idealism  and  the  very  crux  of  the  concept  of  the 
State.  However  unthinkingly  he  might  have 
been  led  on  to  encourage  open  diplomacy  in  his 
liberalizing  programme,  when  its  implication  was 
made  vivid  to  him,  he  betrayed  how  mere  a  tool 
the  idea  had  been  in  his  mind  to  accentuate 
America's  redeeming  role.  Not  in  any  sense  as  a 
serious  pragmatic  technique  had  he  thought  of  a 
genuinely  open  diplomacy.  And  how  could  he? 
For  the  last  stronghold  of  State  power  is  foreign 
policy.  It  is  in  foreign  policy  that  the  State  acts 
most  concentratedly  as  the  organized  herd,  acts 
with  fullest  sense  of  aggressive  power,  acts  with 
[179] 


freest  arbitrariness.  In  foreign  policy,  the  State 
is  most  itself.  States,  with  reference  to  each 
other,  may  be  said  to  be  in  a  continual  state  of 
latent  war.  The  "armed  truce,"  a  phrase  so 
familiar  before  1914,  was  an  accurate  description 
of  the  normal  relation  of  States  when  they  are  not 
at  war.  Indeed,  it  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the 
normal  relation  of  States  is  war.  Diplomacy  is  a 
disguised  war,  in  which  States  seek  to  gain  by 
barter  and  intrigue,  by  the  cleverness  of  wits,  the 
objectives  which  they  would  have  to  gain  more 
clumsily  by  means  of  war.  Diplomacy  is  used 
while  the  States  are  recuperating  from  conflicts 
in  which  they  have  exhausted  themselves.  It  is 
the  wheedling  and  the  bargaining  of  the  worn-out 
bullies  as  they  rise  from  the  ground  and  slowly 
restore  their  strength  to  begin  fighting  again.  If 
diplomacy  had  been  a  moral  equivalent  for  war,  a 
higher  stage  in  human  progress,  an  inestimable 
means  of  making  words  prevail  instead  of  blows, 
militarism  would  have  broken  down  and  given 
place  to  it.  But  since  it  is  a  mere  temporary  sub- 
stitute, a  mere  appearance  of  war's  energy  under 
another  form,  a  surrogate  effect  is  almost  exactly 

[180] 


proportioned  to  the  armed  force  behind  it.  When 
it  fails,  the  recourse  is  immediate  to  the  military 
technique  whose  thinly  veiled  arm  it  has  been.  A 
diplomacy  that  was  the  agency  of  popular  demo- 
cratic forces  in  their  non-State  manifestations 
would  be  no  diplomacy  at  all.  It  would  be  no 
better  than  the  Railway  or  Education  Commissions 
that  are  sent  from  one  country  to  another  with 
rational  constructive  purpose.  The  State,  acting 
as  a  diplomatic-military  ideal,  is  eternally  at  war. 
Just  as  it  must  act  arbitrarily  and  autocratically 
in  time  of  war,  it  must  act  in  time  of  peace  in 
this  particular  role  where  it  acts  as  a  unit.  Uni- 
fied control  is  necessarily  autocratic  control. 
Democratic  control  of  foreign  policy  is  therefore 
a  contradiction  in  terms.  Open  discussion  de- 
stroys swiftness  and  certainty  of  action.  The 
giant  State  is  paralyzed.  Mr.  Wilson  retains  his 
full  ideal  of  the  State  at  the  same  time  that  he 
desires  to  eliminate  war.  He  wishes  to  make  the 
world  safe  for  democracy  as  well  as  safe  for 
diplomacy.  When  the  two  are  in  conflict,  his 
clear  political  insight,  his  idealism  of  the  State, 
tells  him  that  it  is  the  nai'ver  democratic  values 

[•Or] 


that  must  be  sacrificed.  The  world  must  pri- 
marily be  made  safe  for  diplomacy.  The  State 
must  not  be  diminished. 

What  is  the  State  essentially1?  The  more 
closely  we  examine  it,  the  more  mystical  and  per- 
sonal it  becomes.  On  the  Nation  we  can  put  our 
hand  as  a  definite  social  group,  with  attitudes  and 
qualities  exact  enough  to  mean  something.  On 
the  Government  we  can  put  our  hand  as  a  certain 
organization  of  ruling  functions,  the  machinery  of 
law-making  and  law-enforcing.  The  Administra- 
tion is  a  recognizable  group  of  political  function- 
aries, temporarily  in  charge  of  the  government. 
But  the  State  stands  as  an  idea  behind  them  all, 
eternal,  sanctified,  and  from  it  Government  and 
Administration  conceive  themselves  to  have  the 
breath  of  life.  Even  the  nation,  especially  in 
!  times  of  war — or  at  least,  its  significant  classes — 
considers  that  it  derives  its  authority,  and  its  pur- 
pose from  the  idea  of  the  State.  Nation  and  State 
are  scarcely  differentiated,  and  the  concrete,  prac- 
tical, apparent  facts  are  sunk  in  the  symbol.  We 
reverence  not  our  country  but  the  flag.  We  may 
criticize  ever  so  severely  our  country,  but  we  are 

[182] 


disrespectful  to  the  flag  at  our  peril.  It  is  the 
flag  and  the  uniform  that  make  men's  heart  beat 
high  and  fill  them  with  noble  emotions,  not  the 
thought  of  and  pious  hopes  for  America  as  a  free 
and  enlightened  nation. 

It  cannot  be  said  that  the  object  of  emotion  is 
the  same,  because  the  flag  is  the  symbol  of  the 
nation,  so  that  in  reverencing  the  American  flag 
we  are  reverencing  the  nation.  For  the  flag  is  not 
a  symbol  of  the  country  as  a  cultural  group,  fol- 
lowing certain  ideals  of  life,  but  solely  a  symbol 
of  the  political  State,  inseparable  from  its  prestige 
and  expansion.  The  flag  is  most  intimately  • 
connected  with  military  achievement,  military 
memory.  It  represents  the  country  not  in  its 
intensive  life,  but  in  its  far-flung  challenge  to  the 
world.  The  flag  is  primarily  the  banner  of  war; 
it  is  allied  with  patriotic  anthem  and  holiday.  It 
recalls  old  martial  memories.  A  nation's  pa- 
triotic history  is  solely  the  history  of  its  wars,  that 
is,  of  the  State  in  its  health  and  glorious  function- 
ing. So  in  responding  to  the  appeal  of  the  flag, 
we  are  responding  to  the  appeal  of  the  State,  to 
the  symbol  of  the  herd  organized  as  an  offensive 

[183] 


and  defensive  body,  conscious  of  its  prowess  and 
its  mystical  herd-strength. 

Even  those  authorities  in  the  present  Adminis- 
tration, to  whom  has  been  granted  autocratic  con- 
trol over  opinion,  feel,  though  they  are  scarcely 
able  to  philosophize  over,  this  distinction.  It  has 
been  authoritatively  declared  that  the  horrid 
penalties  against  seditious  opinion  must  not  be 
construed  as  inhibiting  legitimate,  that  is,  partisan 
criticism  of  the  Administration.  A  distinction  is 
made  between  the  Administration  and  the  Gov- 
ernment. It  is  quite  accurately  suggested  by  this 
attitude  that  the  Administration  is  a  temporary 
band  of  partisan  politicians  in  charge  of  the 
machinery  of  Government,  carrying  out  the 
mystical  policies  of  State.  The  manner  in  which 
they  operate  this  machinery  may  be  freely  dis- 
cussed and  objected  to  by  their  political  oppon- 
ents. The  Governmental  machinery  may  also  be 
legitimately  altered,  in  case  of  necessity.  What 
may  not  be  discussed  or  criticized  is  the  mystical 
policy  itself  or  the  motives  of  the  State  in  in- 
augurating such  a  policy.  The  President,  it  is 
true,  has  made  certain  partisan  distinctions  be- 


tween  candidates  for  office  on  the  ground  of  sup- 
port or  non-support  of  the  Administration,  but 
what  he  meant  was  really  support  or  non-support 
of  the  State  policy  as  faithfully  carried  out  by  the 
Administration.  Certain  of  the  Administration 
measures  were  devised  directly  to  increase  the 
health  of  the  State,  such  as  the  Conscription  and 
the  Espionage  laws.  Others  were  concerned 
merely  with  the  machinery.  To  oppose  the  first 
was  to  oppose  the  State  and  was  therefore  not 
tolerable.  To  oppose  the  second  was  to  oppose 
fallible  human  judgment,  and  was  therefore, 
though  to  be  deprecated,  not  to  be  wholly  inter- 
preted as  political  suicide. 

The  distinction  between  Government  and 
State,  however,  has  not  been  so  carefully  observed. 
In  time  of  war  it  is  natural  that  Government  as 
the  seat  of  authority  should  be  confused  with  the 
State  or  the  mystic  source  of  authority.  You  can- 
not very  well  injure  a  mystical  idea  which  is  the 
State,  but  you  can  very  well  interfere  with  the 
processes  of  Government.  So  that  the  two  be- 
come identified  in  the  public  mind,  and  any  con- 
tempt for  or  opposition  to  the  workings  of  the 


machinery  of  Government  is  considered  equivalent 
to  contempt  for  the  sacred  State.  The  State,  it 
is  felt,  is  being  injured  in  its  faithful  surrogate, 
and  public  emotion  rallies  passionately  to  defend 
it.  It  even  makes  any  criticism  of  the  form  of 
Government  a  crime. 

The  inextricable  union  of  militarism  and  the 
State  is  beautifully  shown  by  those  laws  which 
emphasize  interference  with  the  Army  and  Navy 
as  the  most  culpable  of  seditious  crimes.  Prag- 
matically, a  case  of  capitalistic  sabotage,  or  a 
strike  in  war  industry  would  seem  to  be  far  more 
dangerous  to  the  successful  prosecution  of  the  war 
than  the  isolated  and  ineffectual  efforts  of  an  in- 
dividual to  prevent  recruiting.  But  in  the  tradi- 
tion of  the  State  ideal,  such  industrial  interference 
with  national  policy  is  not  identified  as  a  crime 
against  the  State.  It  may  be  grumbled  against; 
it  may  be  seen  quite  rationally  as  an  impediment 
of  the  utmost  gravity.  But  it  is  not  felt  in  those 
obscure  seats  of  the  herd-mind  which  dictate  the 
identity  of  crime  and  fix  their  proportional  punish- 
ments. Army  and  Navy,  however,  are  the  very 
arms  of  the  State;  in  them  flows  its  most  precious 

[186] 


life-blood.  To  paralyze  them  is  to  touch  the  very 
State  itself.  And  the  majesty  of  the  State  is  so 
sacred  that  even  to  attempt  such  a  paralysis  is  a 
crime  equal  to  a  successful  stroke.  The  will  is 
deemed  sufficient.  Even  though  the  individual  in 
his  effort  to  impede  recruiting  should  utterly  and 
lamentably  fail,  he  shall  be  in  no  wise  spared. 
Let  the  wrath  of  the  State  descend  upon  him  for 
his  impiety!  Even  if  he  does  not  try  any  overt 
action,  but  merely  utters  sentiments  that  may  in- 
cidentally in  the  most  indirect  way  cause  some  one 
to  refrain  from  enlisting,  he  is  guilty.  The 
guardians  of  the  State  do  not  ask  whether  any 
pragmatic  effect  flowed  out  of  this  evil  will  or 
desire.  It  is  enough  that  the  will  is  present. 
Fifteen  or  twenty  years  in  prison  is  not  deemed 
too  much  for  such  sacrilege. 

Such  attitudes  and  such  laws,  which  affront 
every  principle  of  human  reason,  are  no  accident, 
nor  are  they  the  result  of  hysteria  caused  by  the 
war.  They  are  considered  just,  proper,  beautiful 
by  all  the  classes  which  have  the  State  ideal,  and 
they  express  only  an  extreme  of  health  and  vigor 
in  the  reaction  of  the  State  to  its  non-friends. 

[187] 


Such  attitudes  are  inevitable  as  arising  from  the 
.  devotees  of  the  State.     For  the  State  is  a  per- 
sonal as  well  as  a  mystical  symbol,  and  it  can  only 
i 

be  understood  by  tracing  its  historical  origin. 
.  The  modern  State  is  not  the  national  and  intelli- 
gent product  of  modern  men  desiring  to  live  har- 
moniously together  with  security  of  life,  property 
and  opinion.  It  is  not  an  organization  which  has 
been  devised  as  pragmatic  means  to  a  desired  social 
end.  All  the  idealism  with  which  we  have  been 
instructed  to  endow  the  State  is  the  fruit  of  our 
retrospective  imaginations.  What  it  does  for  us 
in  the  way  of  security  and  benefit  of  life,  it  does 
incidentally  as  a  by-product  and  development  of 
its  original  functions,  and  not  because  at  any  time 
men  or  classes  in  the  full  possession  of  their  insight 
and  intelligence  have  desired  that  it  be  so.  It  is 
very  important  that  we  should  occasionally  lift 
the  incorrigible  veil  of  that  ex  post  facto  idealism 
by  which  we  throw  a  glamor  of  rationalization 
over  what  is,  and  pretend  in  the  ecstasies  of  social 
conceit  that  we  have  personally  invented  and  set 
up  for  the  glory  of  God  and  man  the  hoary  institu- 
tions which  we  see  around  us.  Things  are  what 

[188] 


they  are,  and  come  down  to  us  with  all  their  thick 
encrustations  of  error  and  malevolence.  Political 
philosophy  can  delight  us  with  fantasy  and  con- 
vince us  who  need  illusion  to  live  that  the  actual 
is  a  fair  and  approximate  copy — full  of  failings,  of 
course,  but  approximately  sound  and  sincere — of 
that  ideal  society  which  we  can  imagine  ourselves 
as  creating.  From  this  it  is  a  step  to  the  tacit 
assumption  that  we  have  somehow  had  a  hand  in 
its  creation  and  are  responsible  for  its  maintenance 
and  sanctity. 

Nothing  is  more  obvious,  however,  than  that 
every  one  of  us  comes  into  society  as  into  some- 
thing in  whose  creation  we  had  not  the  slightest 
hand.  We  have  not  even  the  advantage  of  con- 
sciousness before  we  take  up  our  careers  on  earth. 
By  the  time  we  find  ourselves  here  we  are  caught 
in  a  network  of  customs  and  attitudes,  the  major 
directions  of  our  desires  and  interests  have  been 
stamped  on  our  minds,  and  by  the  time  we  have 
emerged  from  tutelage  and  reached  the  years  of 
discretion  when  we  might  conceivably  throw  our 
influence  to  the  reshaping  of  social  institutions, 
most  of  us  have  been  so  molded  into  the  society 

[189] 


and  class  we  live  in  that  we  are  scarcely  aware 
of  any  distinction  between  ourselves  as  judging, 
desiring  individuals  and  our  social  environment. 
We  have  been  kneaded  so  successfully  that  we  ap- 
prove of  what  our  society  approves,  desire  what 
our  society  desires,  and  add  to  the  group  our  own 
passional  inertia  against  change,  against  the  effort 
of  reason,  and  the  adventure  of  beauty. 

Every  one  of  us,  without  exception,  is  born  into 
a  society  that  is  given,  just  as  the  fauna  and  flora 
of  our  environment  are  given.  Society  and  its 
institutions  are,  to  the  individual  who  enters  it,  as 
much  naturalistic  phenomena  as  is  the  weather 
itself.  There  is  therefore,  no  natural  sanctity  in 
the  State  any  more  than  there  is  in  the  weather. 
We  may  bow  down  before  it,  just  as  our  an- 
cestors bowed  before  the  sun  and  moon,  but  it  is 
only  because  something  in  us  unregenerate  finds 
satisfaction  in  such  an  attitude,  not  because  there 
is  anything  inherently  reverential  in  the  institution 
worshipped.  Once  the  State  has  begun  to  func- 
tion, and  a  large  class  finds  its  interest  and  its 
expression  of  power  in  maintaining  the  State,  this 
ruling  class  may  compel  obedience  from  any  un- 
[190] 


interested  minority.  The  State  thus  becomes  an 
instrument  by  which  the  |)ower  of  the  whole  herd 
is  wielded  for  the  benefit  of  a  class.  The  rulers 
soon  learn  to  capitalize  the  reverence  which  the 
State  produces  in  the  majority,  and  turn  it  into  a 
general  resistance  towards  a  lessening  of  their 
privileges.  The  sanctity  of  the  State  becomes 
identified  with  the  sanctity  of  the  ruling  class  and 
the  latter  are  permitted  to  remain  in  power  under 
the  impression  that  in  obeying  and  serving  them, 
we  are  obeying  and  serving  society,  the  nation,  the 
great  collectivity  of  all  of  us. 

An  analysis  of  the  State  would  take  us  back  to 
the  beginnings  of  society,  to  the  complex  of  re- 
ligious and  personal  and  herd-impulses  which  has 
found  expression  in  so  many  forms.  What  we 
are  interested  in  is  the  American  State  as  it  be- 
haves and  as  Americans  behave  towards  it  in  this 
twentieth  century,  and  to  understand  that,  we  have 
to  go  no  further  back  than  the  early  English 
monarchy  of  which  our  American  republic  is  the 
direct  descendant.  How  straight  and  true  is  that 
line  of  descent  almost  nobody  realizes.  Those 
persons  who  believe  in  the  sharpest  distinction  be- 


tween  democracy  and  monarchy  can  scarcely  ap- 
preciate how  a  political  institution  may  go  through 
so  many  transformations  and  yet  remain  the  same. 
Yet  a  swift  glance  must  show  us  that  in  all  the 
evolution  of  the  English  monarchy,  with  all  its 
broadenings  and  its  revolutions,  and  even  with  its 
jump  across  the  sea  into  a  colony  which  became 
an  independent  nation  and  then  a  powerful  State, 
the  same  State  functions  and  attitudes  have  been 
preserved  essentially  unchanged.  The  changes 
have  been  changes  of  form  and  not  of  inner  spirit, 
and  the  boasted  extension  of  democracy  has  been 
not  a  process  by  which  the  State  was  essentially 
altered  to  meet  the  shifting  of  classes,  the  exten- 
sion of  knowledge,  the  needs  of  social  organiza- 
tion, but  a  mere  elastic  expansion  by  which  the  old 
spirit  of  the  State  easily  absorbed  the  new  and 
adjusted  itself  successfully  to  its  exigencies. 
Never  once  has  it  been  seriously  shaken.  Only 
once  or  twice  has  it  been  seriously  challenged,  and 
each  time  it  has  speedily  recovered  its  equilibrium 
and  proceeded  with  all  its  attitudes  and  faiths 
reenforced  by  the  disturbance. 

The  modern  democratic  State,  in  this  light,  is 

[  192  ] 


therefore  no  bright  and  rational  creation  of  a  new 
day,  the  political  form  under  which  great  peoples 
are  to  live  healthfully  and  freely  in  a  modern 
world,  but  the  last  decrepit  scion  of  an  ancient  and 
hoary  stock,  which  has  become  so  exhausted  that 
it  scarcely  recognizes  its  own  ancestor,  does,  in  fact 
repudiate  him  while  it  clings  tenaciously  to  the 
archaic  and  irrelevant  spirit  that  made  that  an- 
cestor powerful,  and  resists  the  new  bottles  for 
the  new  wine  that  its  health  as  a  modern  society  so 
desperately  needs.  So  sweeping  a  conclusion 
might  have  been  doubted  concerning  the  American 
State  had  it  not  been  for  the  war,  which  has  pro- 
vided a  long  and  beautiful  series  of  examples  of 
the  tenacity  of  the  State  ideal  and  its  hold  on  the 
significant  classes  of  the  American  nation.  War 
is  the  health  of  the  State,  and  it  is  during  war 
that  one  best  understands  the  nature  of  that  insti- 
tution. If  the  American  democracy  during  war- 
time has  acted  with  an  almost  incredible  trueness 
to  form,  if  it  has  resurrected  with  an  almost  joyful 
fury  the  somnolent  State,  we  can  only  conclude 
that  that  tradition  from  the  past  has  been  un- 
broken, and  that  the  American  republic  is  the 

[193] 


direct  descendant  of  the  early  English  State. 
And  what  was  the  nature  of  this  early  English 
State"?  It  was  first  of  all  a  mediaeval  absolute 
monarchy,  arising  out  of  the  feudal  chaos,  which 
had  represented  the  first  effort  at  order  after  the 
turbulent  assimilation  of  the  invading  barbarians 
by  the  Christianizing  Roman  civilization.  The 
feudal  lord  evolved  out  of  the  invading  warrior 
who  had  seized  or  been  granted  land  and  held  it, 

.  souls  and  usufruct  thereof,  as  fief  to  some  higher 
lord  whom  he  aided  in  war.  His  own  serfs  and 
vassals  were  exchanging  faithful  service  for  the 
protection  which  the  warrior  with  his  organized 
band  could  give  them.  Where  one  invading 
chieftain  retained  his  power  over  his  lesser  lieu- 
tenants, a  petty  kingdom  would  arise,  as  in 
England,  and  a  restless  and  ambitious  king  might 
extend  his  power  over  his  neighbors  and  consoli- 
date the  petty  kingdoms  only  to  fall  before  the 
armed  power  of  an  invader  like  William  the  Con- 
queror, who  would  bring  the  whole  realm  under 
his  heel.  The  modern  State  begins  when  a  prince 
"  secures  almost  undisputed  sway  over  fairly 

1  homogeneous  territory  and  people  and  strives  to 

[  194] 


fortify  his  power  and  maintain  the  order  that  will 
conduce  to  the  safety  and  influence  of  his  heirs. 
The  State  in  its  inception  is  pure  and  undiluted 
monarchy;  it  is  armed  power,  culminating  in  a 
single  head,  bent  on  one  primary  object,  the  re- 
ducing to  subjection,  to  unconditional  and  un- 
qualified loyalty  of  all  the  people  of  a  certain 
territory.  This  is  the  primary  striving  of  the 
State,  and  it  is  a  striving  that  the  State  never 
loses,  through  all  its  myriad  transformations. 

When  this  subjugation  was  once  acquired,  the 
modern  State  had  begun.  In  the  King,  the  sub- 
jects found  their  protection  and  their  sense  of 
unity.  From  his  side,  he  was  a  redoubtable,  am- 
bitious, and  stiff-necked  warrior,  getting  the  su- 
preme mastery  which  he  craved.  But  from  theirs, 
he  was  a  symbol  of  the  herd,  the  visible  emblem 
of  that  security  which  they  needed  and  for  which 
they  drew  gregariously  together.  Serfs  and  vil- 
lains, whose  safety  under  their  petty  lords  had 
been  rudely  shattered  in  the  constant  conflicts  for 
supremacy,  now  drew  a  new  breath  under  the 
supremacy,  that  wiped  out  all  this  local  anarchy. 
King  and  people  agreed  in  the  thirst  for  order,  and 

[195] 


order  became  the  first  healing  function  of  the 
State.  But  in  the  maintenance  of  order,  the  King 
needed  officers  of  justice;  the  old  crude  group-rules 
for  dispensing  justice  had  to  be  codified,  a  system 
of  formal  law  worked  out.  The  King  needed 
ministers,  who  would  carry  out  his  will,  extensions 
of  his  own  power,  as  a  machine  extends  the  power 
of  a  man's  hand.  So  the  State  grew  as  a  gradual 
differentiation  of  the  King's  absolute  power, 
founded  on  the  devotion  of  his  subjects  and  his 
control  of  a  military  band,  swift  and  sure  to  smite. 
Gratitude  for  protection  and  fear  of  the  strong 
arm  sufficed  to  produce  the  loyalty  of  the  country 
to  the  State. 

The  history  of  the  State,  then,  is  the  effort  to 
maintain  these  personal  prerogatives  of  power,  the 
effort  to  convert  more  and  more  into  stable  law  the 
rules  of  order,  the  conditions  of  public  vengeance, 
the  distinction  between  classes,  the  possession  of 
privilege.  It  was  an  effort  to  convert  what  was 
at  first  arbitrary  usurpation,  a  perfectly  apparent 
use  of  unjustified  force,  into  the  taken  for  granted 
and  the  divinely  established.  The  State  moves 
inevitably  along  the  line  from  military  dictator- 

[196] 


ship  to  the  divine  right  of  Kings.  What  had  to 
be  at  first  rawly  imposed  becomes  through  social 
habit  to  seem  the  necessary,  the  inevitable.  The 
modern  unquestioning  acceptance  of  the  State 
comes  out  of  long  and  turbulent  centuries  when 
the  State  was  challenged  and  had  to  fight  its  way 
to  prevail.  The  King's  establishment  of  personal 
power — which  was  the  early  State — had  to  con- 
tend with  the  impudence  of  hostile  barons,  who 
saw  too  clearly  the  adventitious  origin  of  the 
monarchy  and  felt  no  reason  why  they  should  not 
themselves  reign.  Feuds  between  the  King  and 
his  relatives,  quarrels  over  inheritance,  quarrels 
over  tfie  devolution  of  property,  threatened  con- 
stantly the  existence  of  the  new  monarchial  State. 
The  King's  will  to  power  necessitated  for  its  abso- 
lute satisfaction  universality  of  political  control  in 
his  dominions,  just  as  the  Roman  Church  claimed 
universality  of  spiritual  control  over  the  whole 
world.  And  just  as  rival  popes  were  the  inevit- 
able product  of  such  a  pretension  of  sovereignty, 
rival  kings  and  princes  contended  for  that  dazzling 
jewel  of  undisputed  power. 

Not  until  the  Tudor  regime  was  there  in  Eng- 
[197] 


land  an  irresponsible  absolute  personal  monarchy 
on  the  Hnes  of  the  early  State  ideal,  governing  a 
fairly  well-organized  and  prosperous  nation.  The 
Stuarts  were  not  only  too  weak-minded  to  inherit 
this  fruition  of  William  the  Conqueror's  labors, 
but  they  made  the  fatal  mistake  of  bringing  out 
to  public  view  and  philosophy  the  idea  of  Divine 
Right  implicit  in  the  State,  and  this  at  a  time 
when  a  new  class  of  country  gentry  and  burghers 
were  attaining  wealth  and  self-consciousness 
backed  by  the  zeal  of  a  theocratic  and  individual- 
istic religion.  Cromwell  might  certainly,  if  he 
had  continued  in  power,  revised  the  ideal  of  the 
State,  perhaps  utterly  transformed  it,  destroying 
the  concepts  of  personal  power,  and  universal 
sovereignty,  and  substituting  a  sort  of  Government 
of  Presbyterian  Soviets  under  the  tutelage  of  a 
celestial  Czar.  But  the  Restoration  brought  back 
the  old  State  under  a  peculiarly  frivolous  form. 
The  Revolution  was  the  merest  change  of 
monarchs  at  the  behest  of  a  Protestant  majority 
which  insisted  on  guarantees  against  religious 
relapse.  The  intrinsic  nature  of  the  monarchy  as 
the  symbol  of  the  State  was  not  in  the  least  al- 

[198] 


tered.  In  place  of  the  inept  monarch  who  could 
not  lead  the  State  in  person  or  concentrate  in  him- 
self the  royal  prerogatives,  a  coterie  of  courtiers 
managed  the  State.  But  their  direction  was  con- 
sistently in  the  interest  of  the  monarch  and  of  the 
traditional  ideal,  so  that  the  current  of  the  English 
State  was  not  broken. 

The  boasted  English  Parliament  of  lords  and 
commoners  possessed  at  no  time  any  vitality  which 
weakened  or  threatened  to  weaken  the  State  ideal. 
Its  original  purpose  was  merely  to  facilitate  the 
raising  of  the  King's  revenues.  The  nobles  re- 
sponded better  when  they  seemed  to  be  giving  their 
consent.  Their  share  in  actual  government  was 
subjective,  but  the  existence  of  Parliament  served 
to  appease  any  restiveness  at  the  autocracy  of  the 
King.  The  significant  classes  could  scarcely  rebel 
when  they  had  the  privilege  of  giving  consent  to 
the  King's  measures.  There  was  always  outlet 
for  the  rebellious  spirit  of  a  powerful  lord  in  pri- 
vate revolt  against  the  King.  The  only  Parlia- 
ment that  seriously  tried  to  govern  outside  of  and 
against  the  King's  will  precipitated  a  civil  war 
that  ended  with  the  effectual  submission  of  Parlia- 

[  199] 


ment  in  a  more  careless  and  corrupt  autocracy  than 
had  yet  been  known.  By  the  time  of  George  III 
Parliament  was  moribund,  utterly  unrepresenta- 
tive either  of  the  new  bourgeois  classes  or  of 
peasants  and  laborers,  a  mere  frivolous  parody  of 
a  legislature,  despised  both  by  King  and  people. 
The  King  was  most  effectively  the  State  and  his 
ministers  the  Government,  which  was  run  in  terms 
.  of  his  personal  whim,  by  men  whose  only  interest 
.  was  personal  intrigue.  Government  had  been  for 

long  what  it  has  never  ceased  to  be — a  series  of 
i 

berths  and  emoluments  in  Army,  Navy  and  the 
different  departments  of  State,  for  the  representa- 
tives of  the  privileged  classes. 

The  State  of  George  III  was  an  example  of  the 
most  archaic  ideal  of  the  English  State,  the  pure, 
personal  monarchy.  The  great  mass  of  the  people 
had  fallen  into  the  age-long  tradition  of  loyalty 
to  the  crown.  The  classes  that  might  have  been 
restive  for  political  power  were  placated  by  a 
show  of  representative  government  and  the  lucra- 
tive supply  of  offices.  Discontent  showed  itself 
only  in  those  few  enlightened  elements  which 
could  not  refrain  from  irony  at  the  sheer  irration- 

20° 


ality  of  a  State  managed  on  the  old  heroic  lines  for 
so  grotesque  a  sovereign  and  by  so  grotesque  a 
succession  of  courtier-ministers.  Such  discontent 
could  by  no  means  muster  sufficient  force  for  a 
revolution,  but  the  Revolution  which  was  due 
came  in  America  where  even  the  very  obviously 
shadowy  pigment  of  Parliamentary  representation 
was  denied  the  colonists.  All  that  was  vital  in 
the  political  thought  of  England  supported  the 
American  colonists  in  their  resistance  to  the 
obnoxious  government  of  George  III. 

The  American  Revolution  began  with  certain 
latent  hopes  that  it  might  turn  into  a  genuine  break 
with  the  State  ideal.  The  Declaration  of  Inde- 
pendence announced  doctrines  that  were  utterly 
incompatible  not  only  with  the  century-old  con- 
ception of  the  Divine  Right  of  Kings,  but  also 
with  the  Divine  Right  of  the  State.  If  all  gov- 
ernments derive  their  authority  from  the  consent 
of  the  governed,  and  if  a  people  is  entitled,  at  any 
time  that  it  becomes  oppressive,  to  overthrow  it  and 
institute  one  more  nearly  conformable  to  their  in- 
terests and  ideals,  the  old  idea  of  the  sovereignty 
of  the  State  is  destroyed.  The  State  is  reduced  to 
[201] 


the  homely  work  of  an  instrument  for  carrying  out 
popular  policies.  If  revolution  is  justifiable  a 
State  may  be  even  criminal  sometimes  in  resisting 
its  own  extinction.  The  sovereignty  of  the  people 
is  no  mere  phrase.  It  is  a  direct  challenge  to 
the  historic  tradition  of  the  State.  For  it  im- 
plies that  the  ultimate  sanctity  resides  not  in  the 
State  at  all  or  in  its  agent,  the  government,  but  in 
the  nation,  that  is,  in  the  country  viewed  as  a 

cultural   group   and  not   specifically   as   a   king- 

t       * 
dominated  herd.     The  State  then  becomes  a  mere 

instrument,  the  servant  of  this  popular  will,  or  of 
the  constructive  needs^of  the  cultural  group.  The 
Revolution  had  in  it,  therefore,  the  makings  of  a 
very  daring  modern  experiment — the  founding  of 
a  free  nation  which  should  use  the  State  to  effect 
its  vast  purposes  of  subduing  a  continent  just  as 
the  colonists'  armies  had  used  arms  to  detach  their 
society  from  the  irresponsible  rule  of  an  overseas 
king  and  his  frivolous  ministers.  The  history  of 
the  State  might  have  ended  in  1776  as  far  as  the 
American  colonies  were  concerned,  and  the  modern 
nation  which  is  still  striving  to  materialize  itself 
have  been  born. 

[202] 


For  awhile  it  seemed  almost  as  if  the  State  was 
dead.  But  men  who  are  freed  rarely  know  what 
to  do  with  their  liberty.  In  each  colony  the  fatal 
seed  of  the  State  had  been  sown;  it  could  not  dis- 
appear. Rival  prestiges  and  interests  began  to 
make  themselves  felt.  Fear  of  foreign  States, 
economic  distress,  discord  between  classes,  the  in- 
evitable physical  exhaustion  and  prostration  of 
idealism  which  follows  a  protracted  war — all  com- 
bined to  put  the  responsible  classes  of  the  "hew 
States  into  the  mood  for  a  regression  to  the  State 
ideal.  Ostensibly  there  is  no  reason  *vhy  the  mere 
lack  of  a  centralized  State  should  have  destroyed 
the  possibility  of  progress  in  the  new  liberated 
America,  provided  the  inter-state  jealousy  and 
rivalry  could  have  been  destroyed.  But  there 
were  no  leaders  for  this  anti-State  nationalism. 
The  sentiments  of  the  Declaration  remained  mere 
sentiments.  No  constructive  political  scheme  was 
built  on  them.  The  State  ideal,  on  the  other 
hand,  had  ambitious  leaders  of  the  financial 
classes,  who  saw  in  the  excessive  decentralization 
of  the  Confederation  too  much  opportunity  for  the 
control  of  society  by  the  democratic  lower-class 
[203] 


elements.  They  were  menaced  by  imperialistic 
powers  without  and  by  democracy  within. 
Through  their  fear  of  the  former  they  tended  to 
exaggerate  the  impossibility  of  the  latter.  There 
was  no  inclination  to  make  the  new  State  a  school 
where  democratic  experiments  could  be  worked  out 
as  they  should  be.  They  were  unwilling  to  give 
reconstruction  the  term  that  might  have  been 
necessary  to  build  up  this  truly  democratic 
nationalism.  Six  years  is  a  short  time  to  recon- 
struct an  agricultural  country  devastated  by  a  six 
years'  war.  The  popular  elements  in  the  new 
States  had  time  only  to  show  their  turbulence; 
they  were  given  no  time  to  grow.  The  ambitious 
leaders  of 'the  financial  classes  got  a  convention 
called  to  discuss  the  controversies  and  maladjust- 
ments of  the  States,  which  were  making  them 
clamor  for  a  revision  of  the  Articles  of  Confedera- 
tion, and  then,  by  one  of  the  most  successful  coups 
d'etat  in  history,  turned  their  assembly  into  the 
manufacture  of  a  new  government  on  the  strongest 
lines  of  the  old  State  ideal. 

This  new  constitution,  manufactured  in  secret 
session  by  the  leaders  of  the  propertied  and  ruling 
[204] 


classes,  was  then  submitted  to  an  approval  of  the 
electors  which  only  by  the  most  expert  manipula- 
tion was  obtained,  but  which  was  sufficient  to  over- 
ride the  indignant  undercurrent  of  protest  from 
those  popular  elements  who  saw  the  fruits  of  the 
Revolution  slipping  away  from  them.  Universal 
suffrage  would  have  kille.d  it  forever.  Had  the 
liberated  colonies  had  the  advantage  of  the  French 
experience  before  them,  the  promulgation  of  the 
Constitution  would  undoubtedly  have  been  fol- 
lowed by  a  new  revolution,  as  very  nearly  hap- 
pened later  against  Washington  and  the  Federal- 
ists. But  the  ironical  ineptitude  of  Fate  put  the 
machinery  of  the  new  Federalist  constitutional 
government  in  operation  just  at  the  moment  that 
the  French  Revolution  began,  and  by  the  time 
those  great  waves  of  Jacobin  feeling  reached 
North  America,  the  new  Federalist  State  was 
firmly  enough  on  its  course  to  weather  the  gale 
and  the  turmoil. 

The  new  State  was  therefore  not  the  happy  po- 
litical symbol  of  a  united  people,  who  in  order  to 
form  a  more  perfect  union,  etc.,  but  the  imposition 
of  a  State  on  a  loose  and  growing  nationalism, 
[20$] 


which  was  in  a  condition  of  unstable  equilibrium 
and  needed  perhaps  only  to  be  fertilized  from 
abroad  to  develop  a  genuine  political  experiment 
in  democracy.  The  preamble  to  the  Constitution, 
as  was  s6on  shown  in  the  hostile  popular  vote  and 
later  in  the  revolt  against  the  Federalists,  was  a 
pious,  hope  rather  than  actuality,  a  blessedness 
to  be  realized  when  by  the  force  of  government 
pressure,  the  creation  of  idealism,  and  mere  social 
habit,  the  population  should  be  welded  and 
kneaded  into  a  State.  That  this  is  what  has  ac- 
tually happened,  is  seen  in  the  fact  that  the  some- 
what shockingly  undemocratic  origins  of  the 
American  State  have  been  almost  completely 
glossed  over  and  the  unveiling  is  bitterly  resented, 
by  none  so  bitterly  as  the  significant  classes  who 
have  been  most  industrious  in  cultivating  patriotic 
myth  and  legend.  American  history,  as  far  as  it 
has  entered  into  the  general  popular  emotion,  runs 
along  this  line:  The  Colonies  are  freed  by  the 
Revolution  from  a  tyrannous  King  and  become 
free  and  independent  States;  there  follow  six 
years  of  impotent  peace,  during  which  the  Col- 
onies quarrel  among  themselves  and  reveal  the 
[206] 


hopeless  weakness  of  the  principle  under  which 
they  are  working  together;  in  desperation  the  peo- 
ple then  create  a  new  instrument,  and  launch  a 
free  and  democratic  republic,  which  was  and  re- 
mains— especially  since  it  withstood  the  shock  of 
civil  war — the  most  perfect  form  of  democratic 
government  known  to  man,  perfectly  adequate  to 
be  promulgated  as  an  example  in  the  twentieth 
century  to  all  people,  and  to  be  spread  by  propa- 
ganda, and,  if  necessary,  the  sword,  in  all  unregen- 
\ 

erately  Imperial  regions.  Modern  historians  re- 
veal the  avowedly  undemocratic  personnel  and 
opinions  of  the  Convention.  They  show  that  the 
members  not  only  had  an  unconscious  economic  in- 
terest but  a  frank  political  interest  in  founding  a 
State  which  should  protect  the  propertied  classes 
against  the  hostility  of  the  people.  They  show 
how,  from  one  point  of  view,  the  new  government 
became  almost  a  mechanism  for  overcoming  the 
repudiation  of  debts,  for  putting  back  into  their 
place  a  farmer  and  small  trader  class  whom  the 
unsettled  times  of  reconstruction  had  threatened 
to  liberate,  for  reestablishing  on  the  securest  basis 
of  the  sanctity  of  property  and  the  State,  their 

[207] 


class-supremacy  menaced  by  a  democracy  that  had 
drunk  too  deeply  at  the  fount  of  Revolution.  But 
all  this  makes  little  impression  on  the  other  legend 
of  the  popular  mind,  because  it  disturbs  the  sense 
of  the  sanctity  of  the  State  and  it  is  this  rock  to 
which  the  herd-wish  must  cling. 

Every  little  school  boy  is  trained  to  recite  the 
weaknesses  and  inefficiencies  of  the  Articles  of 
Confederation.  It  is  taken  as  axiomatic  that  un- 
der them  the  new  nation  was  falling  into  anarchy 
and  was  only  saved  by  the  wisdom  and  energy  of 

s 

the  Convention.  These  hapless  articles  have  had 
to  bear  the  infamy  cast  upon  the  untried  by  the 
radiantly  successful.  The  nation  had  to  be  strong 
to  repel  invasion,  strong  to  pay  to  the  last  loved 
copper  penny  the  debts  of  the  propertied  and  the 
provident  ones,  strong  to  keep  the  unpropertied 
and  improvident  from  ever  using  the  government 
to  ensure  their  own  prosperity  at  the  expense  of 
moneyed  capital.  Under  the  Articles  the  new 
States  were  obviously  trying  to  reconstruct  them- 
selves in  an  alarming  tenderness  for  the  common 
man  impoverished  by  the  war.  No  one  suggests 
that  the  anxiety  of  the  leaders  of  the  heretofore 

[208] 


unquestioned  ruling  classes  desired  the  revision  of 
the  Articles  and  labored  so  weightily  over  a  new 
instrument  not  because  the  nation  was  failing  un- 
der the  Articles  but  because  it  was  succeeding  only 
too  well.  Without  intervention  from  the  leaders, 
reconstruction  threatened  in  time  to  turn  the  new 
nation  into  an  agrarian  and  proletarian  democ- 
racy. It  is  impossible  to  predict  what  would  have 
been  worked  out  in  time,  whether  the  democratic 
idealism  implicit  in  the  Declaration  of  Independ- 
ence would  have  materialized  into  a  form  of  so- 
ciety very  much  modified  from  the  ancient  State. 
All  we  know  is  that  at  a  time  when  the  current 
of  political  progress  was  in  the  direction  of  agra- 
rian and  proletarian  democracy,  a  force  hostile  to 
it  gripped  the  nation  and  imposed  upon  it  a  power- 
ful form  against  which  it  was  never  to  succeed  in 
doing  more  than  'blindly  struggle.  The  liberating 
virus  of  the  Revolution  was  definitely  expunged, 
and  henceforth  if  it  worked  at  all  it  had  to  work 
against  the  State,  in  opposition  to  the  armed  and 
respectable  power  of  the  nation. 

The  propertied  classes,  seated  firmly  in  the  sad- 
dle by  their  Constitutional  coup  d'etat^  have,  of- 
[209] 


course,  never  lost  their  ascendancy.  The  partic- 
ular group  of  Federalists  who  had  engineered  the 
new  machinery  and  enjoyed  the  privilege  of  set- 
ting it  in  motion,  were  turned  out  in  a  dozen  years 
by  the  "Jeffersonian  democracy"  whom  their  man- 
ner had  so  deeply  offended.  But  the  Jeffersonian 
democracy  never  meant  in  practice  any  more  than 
the  substitution  of  the  rule  of  the  country  gen- 
tleman for  the  rule  of  the  town  capitalist.  The 

true  hostility  between  their  interests  was  small  as 

i 

compared  with  the  hostility  of  both  towards  the 
common  man.  When  both  were  swept  away  by 
the  irruption  of  the  Western  democracy  under  An- 
drew Jackson  and  the  rule  of  the  common  man 
appeared  for  awhile  in  its  least  desirable  forms, 
it  was  comparatively  easy  for  the  two  propertied 
classes  to  form  at  tacit  coalition  against  them. 
The  new  West  achieved  an  extension  of  suffrage 
and  a  jovial  sense  of  having  come  politically  into 
its  own,  but  the  rule  of  the  ancient  classes  was  not 
seriously  challenged.  Their  squabbles  over  the 
tariff, were  family  affairs,  for  the  tariff  could  not 
materially  affect  the  common  man  of  either  East 
or  West.  The  Eastern  and  Northern  capitalists 
[210] 


soon  saw  the  advantage  of-  supporting  Southern 
country  gentleman  slave-power  as  against  the^f  ree- 
soil  pioneer.  v  Bad  generalship  on  the  part  of  this 
coalition  allowed  a  Western  free-soil  minority 
President  to  slip  into  office  and  brought  on  the" 
Civil  War,  which  smashed  the  slave  ppwer  and 
left  Northern  capital  in  undisputed  possession  of 
a  field  against  which  the  pioneer  could  make  only 
sporadic  and  ineffective  revolts. 

From  jhe  Civil  War  to  the  death  of  Mark 
Hanna,  the  propertied  capitalist  industrial  classes 
ran  a  triumphal  career  in  possession  of  the  State. 
At  various  'times,  as  in  1896,  the  country  had  to 
be  saved  for  them  from  disillusioned,  rebellious 
hordes  of  small  farmers  and  traders  and  demo- 
cratic idealists,  who  had  in  the  overflow  of  pros- 
perity been  squeezed  down  into  the  small  end  of 
the  horn.  But  except  for  these  occasional  men- 
aces, business,  that  is  to  say,  aggressive  expansion- 
ist capitalism,  had  nearly  forty  years  in  which  to 
direct  the  American  republic  as  a  private  preserve, 
or  laboratory,  experimenting,  developing/  wasting, 
subjugating,  to  its  heart's  content,  in  the  midst  of 
a  vast  somnolence  of  complacency  such  as  has 
[211] 


never  been  seen  and  contrasts  strangely  with  the 
spiritual  dissent  and  constructive  revolutionary 
thought  which  went  on  at  the  same  time  in  Eng- 
land and  the  Continent. 

That  era  ended  in  1904  like  the  crack  of  doom, 
which  woke  a  whole  people  into  a  modern  day 
which  they  had  far  overslept,  and  for  which  they 
had  no  guiding  principles  or  philosophy  to  conduct 
them  about.  They  suddenly  became  acutely  and 
painfully  aware  of  the  evils  of  the  society  in  which 
they  had  slumbered  and  they  snatched  at  one  after 
the  other  idea,  programme,  movement,  ideal,  to 
uplift  them  out  of  the  slough  in  which  they  had 
slept.  The  glory  of  those  shining  figures — cap- 
tains of  industry — went  out  in  a  sulphuric  gloom. 
The  head  of  the  §tate,  who  made  up  in  dogmatism 
what  he  lacked  in  philosophy,  increased  the  con- 
fusion by  reviving  the  Ten  Commandments  for  po- 
litical purposes,  and  belaboring  the  wicked  with 
them.  The  American  world  tossed  in  a  state  of 
doubt,  of  reawakened  social  conscience,  of  prag- 
matic errbrt  for  the  salvation  of  society.  The  rul- 
ing classes — annoyed,  'bewildered,  harassed — pre- 
tended with  much  bemoaning  that  they  were  losing 

[  212  ] 


their  grip  on  the  State.  Their  inspired  prophets 
uttered  solemn  warnings  against  political  novelty 
and  the  abandonment  of  the  tried  and  tested  fruits 
of  experience. 

These  classes  actually  had  little  to  fear.  A  po- 
litical system  which  had  been  founded  in  the  inter- 
ests of  property  by  their  own  spiritual  and  eco- 
nomic ancestors,  which  had  become  ingrained  in 
the  country's  life  through  a  function  of  120  years, 
which  was  buttressed  (by  a  legal  system  which  went 
back  without  a  break  to  the  early  English  mon- 
archy was  not  likely  to  crumble  befote  the  anger 
of  a  few  muck-rakers,  the  disillusionment  of  a  few 
radical  sociologists,  or  the  assaults  of  proletarian 
minorities.  Those  who  bided  their  time  through 
the  Taft  interregnum,  which  merely  continued  the 
Presidency  until  there  could  be  found  a  statesman 
to  fill  it,  were  rewarded  by  the  appearance  of  the 
exigency  of  a  war,  in  which  business  organization 
was  imperatively  needed.  They  were  thus  able 
to  make  a  neat  and  almost  noiseless  coalition  with 
the  Government.  The  mass  of  the  worried  mid- 
dle-classes, riddled  by  the  campaign  against  Amer- 
ican failings,  which  at  times  extended  almost  to  a 

[213] 


skepticism  of  the  American  State  itself,  were  only 
too  glad  to  sink  back  to  a  glorification  of  the  State 
ideal,  to  feel  about  them  in  war,  the  old  protect- 
ing arms,  to  return  to  the  old  primitive  robust 
sense  of  the  omnipotence  of  the  State,  its  match- 
less virtue,  honor  and  beauty,  driving  away  all  the 
foul  old  doubts  and  dismays. 

That  the  same  class  which  imposed  its  constitu- 
tion on  the  nascent  proletarian  and  agrarian  de- 
mocracy has  maintained  itself  to  this  day  indicates 
how  slight  was  'the  real  effect  of  the  Revolution. 
Wherf^that  political  change  was  consolidated  in 
the  new  government,  it  was  found  that  there  had 
been  a  mere  transfer  of  ruling-class  power  across 
the  seas,  or  rather  that  a  ruling  commercial  class 
in  the  colonies  had  been  able  to  remove  through 
a  war  fought  largely  by  the  masses  a  vexatious 
over-lordship  of  the  irresponsible  coterie  of  minis- 
ters that  surrounded  George  III.  The  colonies 
merely  exchanged  a  system  run  in  the  interest  of 
the  overseas  trade  of  English  wealth  for  a  system 
run  in  the  interest  of  New  England  and  Philadel- 
phia merchanthood,  and  later  of  Southern  slavoc- 
racy.  The  daring  innovation  of  getting  rid  of 


a  king  and  setting  up  a  kingless  State  did  not  ap- 
parently impress  the  hard  headed  farmers.,  and 
small  traders  with  as  much  force  as  it  has  their 
patriotic  defenders.  The  animus  of  the  Conven- 
tion was  so  obviously  monarchical  that  any  exec- 
utive they  devised  could  be  only  a  very  thinly  Dis- 
guised king.  The  compromise  by  which  the  presi- 
dency was  created  proved  but  to  be  the  means  by 

7 

which  very  nearly  the  whole  mass  of  traditional 
royal  prerogatives  was  brought  over  and  lodged  in 
the  new  State. 

The  President  is  an  elected  king,  but  the  fact 
that  he  is  elected  has  proved  to  be  of  far  less  sig- 
nificance in  the  course  of  political  evolution  than 
the  fact  that  he  is  pragmatically  a  king.  It  was 
the  intention  of  the  founders  of  the  Constitution 
that  he  be  elected  by  a  small  body  of  notables,  rep- 
resenting the  ruling  propertied  classes,  who  could 
check  him  up  every  four  years  in  a  new  election. 
This  was  no  innovation.  Kings  have  often  been 
selected  in  this  way  in  European  history,  and  the 
Roman  Emperor  was  regularly  chosen  by  election. 
That  the  American  President's  term  was  limited 
merely  shows  the  confidence  which  the  founders 


felt  in  the  buttressing  force  of  their  instrument. 
His  election  would  never  pass  out  of  the  hands  of 
the  notables,  and  so  the  office  would  be  guaranteed 
to  be  held  by  a  faithful  representative  of  upper- 
class  demands.  What  he  was  most  obviously  to 
represent  was  the  interests  of  that  body  which 
elected  him,  and  not  the  mass  of  the  people  who 
were  still  disfranchised.  For  the  new  State 
started  with  no  Quixotic  belief  in  universal  suf- 
frage. The  property  qualifications  which  were  in 
effect  in  every  colony  were  continued.  Govern- 
ment was  frankly  a  function  of  those  who  held  a 
concrete  interest  in  the  public  weal,  in  the  shape  of 
visible  property.  The  responsibility  for  the  se- 
curity of  property  rights  could  safely  lie  only  with 
those  who  had  something  to  secure.  The  "stake" 
in  the  commonwealth  which  those  who  held  office 
must  possess  was  obviously  larger. 

One  of  the  larger  errors  of  political  insight 
which  the  sage  founders  of  the  Constitution  com- 
mitted was  to  assume  that  the  enfranchised  watch- 
dogs of  property  and  the  public  order  would  re- 
main a  homogeneous  class.  Washington,  acting 
strictly  as  the  mouthpiece  of  the  unified  State 

[216] 


ideal,  deprecated  the  growth  of  parties  and  of  fac- 
tions which  horridly  keep  the  State  in  turbulence 
or  threaten  to  rend  it  asunder.  But  the  monarchi- 
cal and  repressive  policies  of  Washington's  own 
friends  promptly  generated  an  opposition  demo- 
cratic party  representing  the  landed  interests  of 
the  ruling  classes,  and  the  party  system  was  fast- 
ened on  the  country.  By  the  time  the  electorate 
had  succeeded  in  reducing  the  electoral  college  to  a 
mere  recorder  of  the  popular  vote,  or  in  other 
words,  had  broadened  the  class  of  notables  to  the 
whole  property-holding  electorate,  the  parties  were 
firmly  established  to  carry  on  the  selective  and  re- 
fining and  securing  work  of  the  electoral  college.  ^ 
The  party  leadership  then  became,  and  has  re- 
mained ever  since,  the  nucleus  of  notables  who  de- 
termine the  presidency.  The  electorate  having 
won  an  apparently  democratic  victory  in  the  de- 
struction of  the  notables,  finds  itself  reduced  to 
the  role -of  mere  ratification  or  selection  between 
two  or  three  candidates,  in  whose  choice  they  have 
only  a  nominal  share.  The  electoral  college 
which  stood  between  even  the  propertied  elector- 
ate and  the  executive  with  the  prerogatives  of  a 


king,  gave  place  to  a  body  which  was  just  as 
genuinely  a  bar  to  democratic  expression,  and  far 
less  responsible  for  its  acts.  The  nucleus  of  party 
councils  which  became,  after  the  reduction  of  the 
Electoral  College,  the  real  choosers  of  the  Presi- 
dents, were  unofficial,  quasi-anonymous,  utterly 
unchecked  by  the  populace  whose  rulers  they 
chose.  More  or  less  self-chosen,  or  chosen  by  lo- 
cal groups  whom  they  dominated,  they  provided 
a  far  more  secure  guarantee  that  the  State  should 
remain  in  the  hands  of  the  ruling  classes  than  the 
old  electoral  college.  The  party  councils  could 
be  loosely  organized  entirely  outside  of  the  gov- 
ernmental organization,  without  oversight  by  the 
State  or  check  from  the  electorate.  They  could 
be  composed  of  the  leaders  of  the  propertied 
classes  themselves  or  their  lieutenants,  who  could 
retain  their  power  indefinitely,  or  at  least  until 
they  were  unseated  by  rivals  within  the  same 
charmed  domain.  They  were  at  least  entirely 
safe  from  attack  by  the  officially  constituted  elec- 
torate, who,  as  the  party  system  became  more  and 
more  firmly  established,  found  they  could  vote 
only  on  the  slates  set  up  for  them  by  unknown 

[218] 


councils   behind   an   imposing   and    all-powerful 
"Party." 

As  soon  as  this  system  was  organized  into  a 
hierarchy  extending  from  national  down  to  state 
and  county  politics,  it  became  perfectly  safe  to 
broaden  the  electorate.  The  clamors  of  the  un- 
propertied  or  the  less  propertied  to  share  in  the  se- 
lection of  their  democratic  republican  government 
could  be  graciously  acceded  to  without  endanger- 
ing in  the  least  the  supremacy  of  those  classes 
which  the  founders  had  meant  to  be  supreme. 
The  minority  were  now  even  more  effectually  pro- 
tected from  the  majority  than  under  the  old  sys- 
tem, however  indirect  the  election  might  be.  The 
electorate  was  now  reduced  to  a  ratifier  of  slates, 
and  as  a  ratifier  of  slates,  or  a  chooser  between  two 
slates,  both  of  which  were  pledged  to  upper-class 
domination,  the  electorate  could  have  the  freest, 
most  universal  suffrage,  for  any  mass-desire  for 
political  change,  any  determined  will  to  shift  the 
class-balance,  would  be  obliged  to  register  itself 
through  the  party  machinery.  It  could  make  no 
frontal  attack  on  the  Government.  And  the  party 
machinery  was  directly  devised  to  absorb  and  neu- 
[219] 


tralize  this  popular  shock,  handing  out  to  the  dis- 
gruntled electorate  a  disguised  stone  when  it  asked 
for  political  bread,  and  effectually  smashing  any 
third  party  which  ever  avariciously  tried  to  reach 
government  except  through  the  regular  two-party 
system. 

The  party  system  succeeded,  of  course,  beyond 
the  wildest  dreams  of  its  creators.  It  relegated 
the  founders  of  the  Constitution  to  the  role  of  doc- 
trinaire theorists,  political  amateurs.  Just  be- 
cause it  grew  up  slowly  to  meet  the  needs  of  am- 
bitious politicians  and  was  not  imposed  by  ruling- 
class  fiat,  as  was  the  Constitution,  did  it  have  a 
chance  to  become  assimilated,  worked  into  the  po- 
litical intelligence  and  instinct  of  the  people,  and 
be  adopted  gladly  and  universally  as  a  genuine 
political  form,  expressive  both  of  popular  need 
and  ruling-class  demand.  It  satisfied  the  popular 
demand  for  democracy.  The  enormous  sense  of 
victory  which  followed  the  sweeping  away  of 
property  qualifications  of  suffrage,  the  tangible 
evidence  that  now  every  citizen  was  participating 
in  public  affairs,  and  that  the  entire  manhood  de- 
mocracy was  now  self-governing,  created  a  mood 
[  220] 


of  political  complacency  that  lasted  uninterrupt- 
edly into  the  twentieth  century.  The  party  sys- 
tem was  thus  the  means  of  removing  political 
grievance  from  the  greater  part  of  the  populace, 
and  of  giving  to  the  ruling  classes  the  hidden  but 
genuine  permanence  of  control  which  the  Consti- 
tution had  tried  openly  to  give  them.  It  supple- 
mented and  repaired  the  ineptitudes  of  the  Consti- 
tution. It  became  the  unofficial  but  real  govern- 
ment, the  instrument  which  used  the  Constitution 
as  its  instrument. 

Only  in  two  cases  did  the  party  system  seem  to 
lose  its  grip,  was  it  thrown  off  its  base  by  the  in- 
ception of  a  new  party  from  without — in  the  elec- 
tions of  Jackson  and  of  Lincoln.  Jackson  came 
in  as  the  representative  of  a  new  democratic  West 
which  had  no  tradition  of  suffrage  qualifications, 
and  Lincoln  as  a  minority  candidate  in  a  time  of 
factional  and  sectional  strife.  But  the  discom- 
fiture of  the  party  politicians  was  short.  The 
party  system  proved  perfectly  capable  of  assimilat- 
ing both  of  these  new  movements.  Jackson's  in- 
surrection was  soon  captured  by  the  old  machinery 
and  fed  the  slavocracy,  and  Lincoln's  party  be- 
[22l] 


came  the  property  of  the  new  bonanza  capitalism. 
Neither  Jackson  or  Lincoln  made  the  slightest  de- 
flection in  the .  triumphal  march  of  the  party-sys- 
tem. In  practically  no  other  contests  has  the  elec- 
torate had  for  all  practical  purposes  a  choice  ex- 
cept between  two  candidates,  identical  as  far  as 
their  political  role  would  be  as  representatives  of 
the  significant  classes  in  the  State.  Campaigns 
sucK  as  Bryan's,  where  one  of  the  parties  is  cap- 
tured by  an  element  which  seeks  a  real  transfer- 
ence'of  power  from  the  significant  to  the  less  sig- 
nificant classes,  split  the  party,  and  sporadic  third 
party  attacks  merely  throw  the  scale  one  way  or 
the  other  between  the  big  parties,  or,  if  threaten- 
ing-, enough,  produce  a  virtual  coalition  against 
them. 

To  most  of  the  Americans  of  the  classes  which 
•  \ 
consider  themselves  significant  the  war  brought  a 

sense  of  the  sanctity  of  the  State,  which,  if  they 
had  had  time  to  think  about  it,  would  have  seemed 
a  sudden  and  surprising  alteration  in  their  habits 
of  thought.  In  times  of  peace,  we  usually  ignore 
the  State  in  favor  of  partisan  political  contro- 
versies, or  personal  struggles  for  office,  or  the  pur- 
[  222  ] 


suit  of  party  policies.  It  is  the  Government 
rather  than  the  State  with  which  the  politically 
minded  are  concerned.  The  State  is  reduced  to  a 
shadowy  emblem  which  comes  to  consciousness 
only  on  occasions  of  patriotic  holiday. 

Government  is  obviously  composed  of  common 
and  unsanctified  men,  and  is  thus  a  legitimate  ob- 
ject of  criticism  and  even  contempt.  If  your  own 
party  is  in  power,  things  may  be  assumed  to  be 
moving  safely  enough;  but  if  the  opposition^  in, 
then  clearly  all  safety  and  honor  have*  fled  the 
State.  Yet  you  do  not  put  it  to  yourself  in  quite 
that  way.  What  you  think  is  only  that  there  are 
rascals  to  be  turned  out  of  a  very  practical  ma- 
chinery of  offices  and  functions  which  you  take 
for  granted.  When  we  say  that  Americans  are 
lawless,  we  usually  mean  that  they  are  less  con- 
scious than  other  peoples  of  the  august  majesty 
of  the  institution  of  the  State  as  it  stands  behind 
the  objective 'government  of  men  and  laws  which 
we  see.  In  a  republic  the  men  who  hold  office  are 
indistinguishable  from  the  mass.  Very  few  of 
them  possess  the  slightest  personal  dignity  with 
which  they  could  endow  their  political  role;  even 
[223] 


f 

if  they  ever  thought  of  such  a  thing.     And  they 

have  no  class  distinction  to  give  them  glamor.  In 
a  Republic  the  Government  is  obeyed  grumblingly, 
because  it  has  no  bedazzlements  or  sanctities  to 
gild  it.  If  you  are  a  good  old-fashioned  demo- 
crat, you  rejoice  at  this  fact,  you  glory  in  the 
plainness  of  a'system  where  every  citizen  has  be- 
come a -king.  If  you  are  more  sophisticated  you 
bemoan  the  passing  of  dignity  and  honor  from 
affairs  of  State.  But  in  practice,  the  democrat 
does  not  in  the  least  treat  his  elected  citizen  with 
the  respect  due  to  a  king,  nor  does  the  sophisti- 
cated citizen  pay  tribute  to  the  dignity  even  when 
he  finds  it.  The  republican  state  has  almost  no 
trappings  to  appeal  to  the  common  man's  emo- 
tions. What  it  has  are  of  military  origin,  and  in 
an  unmilitary  era  such  as  we  have  passed  through 
since  the  Civil  War,  even  military  trappings  have 
been  scarcely  seen.  In  such  an  era  the  sense  of 
the  State  almost  fades  out  of  the  consciousness  of 
men. 

~%v   With   the  shock  of  war,   however,   the   State 

comes  into  its  own  again.     The  Government,  with 

no  mandate  from  the  people,  without  consultation 

[224] 


of  the  people,  conducts  all  the  negotiations,  the 
backing  and  filling,  the  menaces  and  explanations, 
which  slowly  bring  it  into  collision  with  some  other 
Government,  and  gently  and  irresistibly  slides  the 
country  into  war.  For  the  benefit  of  proud  and 
haughty  citizens,  it  is  fortified  with  a  list  of  the 
intolerable  insults  which  have  been  hurled  to- 
wards us  by  the  other  nations ;  for  the  benefit  of  the 
liberal  and  beneficent,  it  has  a  convincing  set  of 
moral  purposes  which  ous,-  going  to  war  will 
achieve;  for  the  ambitious  and  aggressive  classes, 
it  can  gently  whisper  of  a  bigger  role  in  the  destiny 
of  the  world.  The  result  is  that,  even  in  those 
countries  where  the  business  of  declaring  war  is 
theoretically  in  the  hands  of  representatives  of 
the  people,  no  legislature  has  ever  been  known  to 
decline  the  request  of  an  Executive,  which  has 
conducted  all  foreign  affairs  in  utter  privacy  and 
irresponsibility,  that  it  order  the  nation  into  bat- 
tle. Good  democrats  are  wont  to  feel  the  crucial 
difference  between  a  State  in  which  the  popular 
Parliament  or  Congress  declares  war,  and  the  State" 
in  which  an  absolute  monarch  or  ruling  class  de- 
clares war.  But,  put  to  the  stern  pragmatic  test, 
[225] 


the  difference  is  not  striking.  In  the  freeest  of  re- 
publics as  well  as  in  the  most  tyrannical  of  Em- 
pires, all  foreign  policy,  the  diplomatic  negotia- 
tions which  produce  or  forestall  war,  are  equally 
the  private  property  of  the  Executive  part  of  the 
Government,  and  are  equally  exposed  to  no  check 
whatever  from  popular  bodies,  or  the  people  vot- 
ing as  admass  themselves. 

The  moment  war  is  declared,  however,  the  mass 
of  the  people,  through  some  spiritual  alchemy,  be- 
come convinced  that  they  have  willed  and  exe- 
cuted the  deed  themselves.  They  then  with  the 
exception  of  a  few  malcontents,  proceed  to  allow 
themselves  to  be  regimented,  coerced,  deranged  in 
all  the  environments  of  their  lives,  and  turned  into 
a  solid  manufactory  of  destruction  toward  what- 
ever other  people  may  have,  in  the  appointed 
scheme  of  things,  come  within  the  range  of 
the  Government's  disapprobation.  The  citizen 
throws  off  his  contempt  and  indifference  to  Gov- 
ernment, identifies  himself  with  its  purposes,  re- 
vives all  his  military  memories  and  symbols,  and 
the  State  once  more  walks,  an  august  presence, 
through  the  imaginations  of  men.  Patriotism  be- 

[226] 


comes  the  dominant  feeling,  and  produces  immedi- 
ately that  intense  and  hopeless  confusion  between 
the  relations  which  the  individual  bears  and  should 
bear  towards  the  society  of  which  he  is  a  part. 

The  patriot  loses  all  sense  of  the  distinction  be- 
tween State,  nation  and  government.  In  our 
quieter  moments,  the  Nation  or  Country  forms  the 
basic  idea  of  society.  We  think  vaguely  of  a  loose 
population  spreading  over  a  certain  geographical 
portion  of  the  earth's  surface,  speaking  a  com- 
mon language,  and  living  in  a  homogeneous  civi- 
lization. Our  idea  of  Country  concerns  itself 
with  the  non-political  aspects  of  a  people,  its  ways 
of  living,  its  personal  traits,  its  literature  and  art, 
its  characteristic  attitudes  towards  life.  We  are 
Americans  because  we  live  in  a  certain  bounded 
territory,  because  our  ancestors  have  carried  on  a 
great  enterprise  of  pioneering  and  colonization,  be- 
cause we  live  in  certain  kinds  of  communities 
which  have  a  certain  look  and  express  their  aspira- 
tions in  certain  ways.  We  can  see  that  our  civ- 
ilization is  different  from  contiguous  civilizations" 
like  the  Indian  and  Mexican.  The  institutions  of 
our  country  form  a  certain  network  which  affects 
[227] 


us  vitally  and  intrigues  our  thoughts  in  a  way  that 
these  other  civilizations  do  not.  We  are  a  part 
of  country,  for  better  or  for  worse.  We  have  ar- 
rived in  it  through  the  operation  of  physiological 
laws,  and  not  in  any  way  through  our  own  choice. 
By  the  time  we  ha*e  reached  what  are  called  years 
of  discretion,  its  influences  have  molded  our  habits, 
our  values,  our  ways  of  thinking,  so  that  however 
aware  we  may  become,  we  never  really  lose  the 
stamp  of  our  civilization,  or  could  be  mistaken  for 
the  child  of  any  other  country.  Our  feeling  for 
our  fellow-countrymen  is  one  of  similarity  or  of 
mere  acquaintance.  We  may  be  intensely  proud 
of  and  congenial  to  our  particular  network  of 
civilization,  or  we  may  detest  most  of  its  qualities 
and  rage  at  its  defects.  This  does  not  alter  the 
fact  that  we  are  inextricably  bound  up  in  it.  The 
Country,  as  an  inescapable  group  into  which  we 
are  born,  and  which  makes  us  its  particular  kind 
of  a  citizen  of  the  world,  seems  to  be  a  funda- 
mental fact  of  our  consciousness,  an  irreducible 
minimum  of  social  feeling. 

Now  this  feeling  for  country  is  essentially  non- 
competitive  ;  we  think  of  our  own  people  merely  as 

[228] 


living  on  the  earth's  surface  along  with  other 
groups,  pleasant  or  objectionable  as  they  may  be, 
but  fundamentally  as  sharing  the  earth  with  them. 
In  our  simple  conception  of  country  there  is  no 
more  feeling  of  rivalry  with  other  peoples  than 
there  is  in  our  feeling  for  our  family.  Our  in- 
terest turns  within  rather  than  without,  is  intensive 
and  not  belligerent.  We  grow  up  and  our  imag- 
inations gradually  stake  out  the  world  we  live  in, 
they  need  no  greater  conscious  satisfaction  for 
their  gregarious  impulses  than  this  sense  of  a  great 
mass  of  people  to  whom  we  are  more  or  less  at- 
tuned, and  in  whose  institutions  we  are  function- 
ing. The  feeling  for  country  would  be  an  unin- 
flatable  maximum  were  it  not  for  the  ideas  of  State 
and  Government  which  are  associated  with  it. 
Country  is  a  concept  of  peace,  of  tolerance,  of  liv- 
ing and  letting  live.  But  State  is  essentially  a 
concept  of  power,  of  competition;  it  signifies  a 
group  in  its  aggressive  aspects.  And  we  have  the 
misfortune  of  being  born  not  only  into  a  country 
but  into  a  State,  and  as  we  grow  up  we  learn  to 
mingle  the  two  feelings  into  a  hopeless  confusion. 
The  State  is  the  country  acting  as  a  political 
[229] 


unit,  it  is  the  group  acting  as  a  repository  of  force, 
determiner  of  law,  arbiter  of  justice.  Interna- 
tional politics  is  a  "power  politics"  because  it  is 
a  relation  of  States  and  that  is  what  States  infal- 
libly and  calamitously  are,  huge  aggregations  of 
human  and  industrial  force  that  may  be  hurled 
against  each  other  in  war.  When  a  country  acts 
as  a  whole  in  relation  to  another  coutnry,  or  in 
imposing  laws  on  its  own  inhabitants,  or  in  coerc- 
ing or  punishing  individuals  or  minorities,  it  is  act- 
ing as  a  State.  The  history  of  America  as  a  coun- 
try is  quite  different  from  that  of  America  as  a 
State.  In  one  case  it  is  the  drama  of  the  pioneer- 
ing conquest  of  the  land,  of  the  growth  of  wealth 
and  the  ways  in  which  it  was  used,  of  the  enter- 
prise of  education,  and  the  carrying  out  of  spirit- 
ual ideals,  of  the  struggle  of  economic  classes. 
But  as  a  State,  its  history  is  that  of  playing  a  part 
in  the  world,  making  war,  obstructing  interna- 
tional trade,  preventing  itself  from  being  split  to 
pieces,  punishing  those  citizens  whom  society 
agrees  are  offensive,  and  collecting  money  to  pay 
for  all.  .  .  . 

THE    END 


V 


uc  SOUTHERN  REG!C;,Mj1j|H,,j,i,' i|iii|iiiiii  INI 
A     000  659  494     9 


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